Senior Manager, Software Engineering

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