Optum is a global organization that delivers care, aided by technology to help millions of people live healthier lives. The Senior Manager of Software Engineering will lead a team focused on building AI/ML-driven applications that improve healthcare outcomes by streamlining information flow among stakeholders.
Responsibilities:
- Manage and develop engineers through coaching, regular 1:1s, goal setting, performance feedback, and career growth planning
- Own delivery outcomes for the team: establish clear plans, scope and sequence work, manage dependencies, and ensure commitments are met with predictable execution
- Drive work management practices: define roles and on call/ownership models, balance capacity across priorities, and remove delivery blockers
- Provide technical direction and ensure high-quality design and implementation via architecture alignment, design reviews, and engineering standards
- Remain close to the code with approximately 30% hands-on contribution (e.g., critical paths, prototypes, design/code reviews), and champion the use of AI-based tools to improve engineering productivity and quality
- Champion secure engineering and proactively identify/close security gaps in solution design and delivery
- Build and operate production-grade services and pipelines with strong reliability practices (observability, diagnostics, incident response readiness)
- Drive CI/CD and automated testing practices to improve delivery velocity without sacrificing safety and compliance
- Set clear expectations and team norms; create a culture of accountability, psychological safety, learning, and continuous improvement
- Lead Agile planning and execution (refinement, planning, retrospectives) to improve throughput, predictability, and alignment to outcomes
- Partner with product, architecture, SRE, security, data/AI teams, and stakeholders to translate strategy into executable roadmaps and measurable delivery
- Communicate status, tradeoffs, and risks clearly; escalate early when needed, and drive alignment across distributed teams and leadership
Requirements:
- 9+ years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent depth of experience delivering production systems)
- 4+ years of development experience with .NET, JavaScript, and/or Python (one may be primary; the others can be working proficiency)
- 3+ years of development and operational experience in the public cloud. Azure preferred
- 2+ years of experience as a technical lead and/or people manager (e.g., leading a squad/team, owning delivery, coaching engineers)
- 2+ years of experience in relational databases (SQL)
- A grasp of software engineering fundamentals: testing, CI/CD, secure coding, performance, and operational readiness
- Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, lead delivery, and influence engineering decisions across a team/domain
- Experience in healthcare
- Expert understanding of engineering fundamentals: unit testing, code reviews, telemetry, agile and DevOps
- Hands-on experience leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Experience with microservices and event-driven architecture (APIs, messaging) supporting high-availability systems
- Experience designing secure, compliant systems in regulated environments; demonstrated security-minded engineering
- Data/AI platform experience (e.g., building or operating analytics/ML pipelines and/or data products that enable monitoring and trustworthy delivery of insights)
- Infrastructure as Code and cloud automation (e.g., Terraform) for repeatable environments