Vice President, Software Engineering

Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation. Our teams develop cutting-edge solutions that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. From advanced data analytics and AI to cybersecurity, we use innovative approaches to solve some of health care's most complex challenges. Your contributions here have the potential to change lives. Ready to build the next breakthrough? Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

In this critical engineering leadership role, you will be accountable for leading a global team of engineers who are accountable for the technology ecosystem running our UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement business. 

Primary Responsibilities:

Engineering & AI First Modernization Leadership

• Define and execute a multi year AI first modernization strategy aligned to the company's priorities, growth goals, and operating model
• Lead the transformation of legacy platforms and applications toward AI enabled, cloud native, API driven architectures that improve speed, resilience, and cost efficiency
• Manage multimillion dollar portfolios and deliver measurable cost savings. Own engineering investment portfolios and budgets, with accountability for ROI, sequencing trade offs, and value realization across modernization and AI initiatives
• Champion an AI first engineering culture, where automation, intelligent workflows, code assist, and platform intelligence are embedded into how teams design, build, test, and operate software
• Build, lead, and scale a high performing global engineering organization with a solid culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and inclusion, enabled by AI driven productivity and insights
• Recruit, develop, and mentor senior engineering leaders capable of driving platform modernization and AI led delivery at scale

Platform & Application Modernization (AI Enabled by Design)

• Oversee the modernization of consumer and enterprise platforms supporting millions of users, ensuring scalability, security, maintainability, and intelligent observability
• Drive platform consolidation, rationalization, and reuse through shared services, common frameworks, reference architectures, and AI powered platform capabilities
• Leverage AI to reduce technical debt, accelerate legacy remediation, improve testing and quality, and enhance developer experience
• Ensure product performance, reliability, and uptime meet or exceed expectations for mission critical, public facing systems, using AI assisted monitoring, incident response, and resilience patterns
• Influence and help establish enterprise engineering, AI, and platform standards to ensure reuse, interoperability, and regulatory consistency across domains

AI, Data & Intelligent Automation

• Establish AI as a foundational capability across the engineering ecosystem, from product features to internal platforms and operations
• Lead integration of GenAI, ML, and advanced analytics into products and platforms to enable personalization, automation, insight generation, and decision support
• Partner with Product, Data, and Analytics teams to ensure platforms enable AI driven, data informed user and operational experiences that deliver measurable value
• Ensure responsible AI adoption, including governance, data ethics, explainability, model risk management, and compliance with healthcare regulations

Healthcare Compliance, Security & Responsible AI

• Ensure platforms and applications are built and operated in compliance with HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2, and other applicable standards
• Embed security, privacy, and responsible AI principles into architecture, tooling, and delivery practices ('secure and compliant by design')
• Proactively identify and mitigate risks related to data integrity, patient safety, AI model behavior, operational resilience, and information security

Operational Excellence, AI Productivity & Cost Optimization

• Own execution across complex portfolios, including modernization roadmaps, budgets, sequencing, and capacity planning, with AI informing prioritization and trade offs
• Drive cost optimization across cloud, tooling, and vendor ecosystems through architecture simplifica