Principal Data Engineering| Eden Prairie, MN | Remote

Principal Data Engineer

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.

The Principal Data Engineer is a senior technical leader within the OHBI program, responsible for designing, building, and evolving enterprise-scale, AI-enabled data platforms that power analytics, reporting, and machine learning.

This role combines hands-on engineering with architectural leadership, owning end-to-end data platform design across Azure, Snowflake, dbt, and modern Lakehouse technologies. The Principal Data Engineer sets engineering standards, ensures production excellence, and serves as a key partner to architecture, product, analytics, and data science teams.

You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely
* from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges. For all hires in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area, you will be required to work in the office a minimum of four days per week.

• Enterprise Data Platform Architecture
• Advanced Data Engineering & Pipeline Development
• AI / ML Data Enablement
• Data Quality, Reliability & Production Ownership
• CI/CD, Governance & Security
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship
• Leadership Expectations
• Stakeholder Collaboration

• Partner closely with Platform Solution Architect to evolve the end-to-end data platform architecture across Azure, Snowflake, dbt, and future architecture changes using lake house technologies (including Iceberg where applicable)
• Define reference architectures, reusable frameworks, and engineering standards for ingestion, transformation, and consumption
• Partner with Platform Solution Architect Drive decisions around scalability, performance, resiliency, security, and cost optimization
• Partner with Tech Engineering Delivery Owner / Platform Architect / Data Architect / Offshore Tech Lead and Offshore Snowflake Admin defining best practices, data models, integration patterns, and implementation strategies

• Design, build, and operate high-volume, high-reliability batch and near real-time data pipelines using Azure Data Factory, dbt, Python, SQL, Snowflake, and related tools
• Implement scalable transformation logic to deliver trusted, analytics-ready datasets
• Support event-driven and streaming architectures were needed
• Apply canonical/common data modeling practices to ensure consistency and reusability across domains

• Enable AI/ML and GenAI use cases by building AI-ready data platforms and pipelines
• Support:
  • Feature engineering and model training pipelines
  • Historical and point-in-time datasets
  • Data versioning and ML lifecycle integration
• Leverage enterprise tools such as Snowflake Cortex and MCP Server deliver governed AI capabilities
• Partner closely with Data Science and ML Engineering teams to enable scalable, production-ready AI solutions

• Establish and enforce data quality, observability, reconciliation, and auditability standards
• Own production stability, including monitoring, incident response, root cause analysis, and long-term remediation
• Implement practices for schema evolution, backward compatibility, and error handling
• Define and track KPIs for data freshness, pipeline reliability, platform performance, and cost efficiency

• Design and manage CI/CD pipelines for data and ML workloads, including automated testing and release orchestration
• Ensure alignment with enterprise governance, security, and regulatory requirements (HIPAA, SDLC, data governance)
• Implement lineage, monitoring, and audit frameworks to support compliance and traceability

• Serve as a senior technical authority and escalation point,…