Principal I O Engineer

Requisition Number: 2338243
Optum is a global organization that delivers care, aided by technology to help millions of people live healthier lives. The work you do with our team will directly improve health outcomes by connecting people with the care, pharmacy benefits, data and resources they need to feel their best. Here, you will find a culture guided by inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health optimization on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.
The Dev/Ops Configuration & Automation Engineer is responsible for designing, developing, and managing the automation to maintain the standards and configurations for AIX/UNIX platform. This role blends deep AIX/UNIX administration expertise with modern DevOps practices, enabling platform stability, security, and operational efficiency. The engineer will work closely with AIX/UNIX SMEs, infrastructure teams, and automation partners to drive standardization, lifecycle management, and scalable automation across the environment.
Primary Responsibilities:

• Automation & Configuration Engineering
  • Develop and maintain Ruby-based automation and Chef cookbooks, recipes, pipelines, and Chef Automate integrations, engineer automated solutions to manage platform stability
  • Build scalable configuration automation supporting platform standards and configurations with mass deployments
  • Manage source code repositories and CI/CD pipelines using Git, GitHub, and GitHub Actions
  • Participate in Agile/DevOps workflows and change management processes
• AIX Platform Standards, Governance & Security
  • Define and maintain AIX platform standards, OS baselines, firmware requirements, filesystem standards, and security hardening guidelines
  • Standardize configurations for LPARs, VIOS, HMCs, and PowerVM
  • Enforce AIX security baselines including SSH, RBAC, sudo, TLS, and CIS benchmarks
  • Maintain OS and firmware lifecycle roadmaps and guide upgrades and migrations
• Platform Stability, Compliance & Lifecycle Management
  • Create and maintain golden images, provisioning templates, and standardized configuration scripts
  • Manage patching, kernel/firmware updates, and OS lifecycle activities to ensure platform stability
  • Ensure compliance with SOX, HIPAA, PCI, internal security requirements, and vulnerability remediation
  • Align platform engineering with enterprise architecture and audit requirements
• Collaboration, Leadership & Knowledge Sharing
  • Serve as a primary technical authority for AIX/UNIX platform questions across engineering, operations, and application teams
  • Lead engineering design, solutions, discussions, technical reviews, and mentor junior engineers
    Maintain clear documentation for builds, configurations, patching, troubleshooting, and operational procedures
  • Partner with peer teams, SMEs to build and support on-prem and cloud-hosted solutions and automation frameworks
• Comply with the terms and conditions of the employment contract, company policies and procedures, and any and all directives (such as, but not limited to, transfer and/or re-assignment to different work locations, change in teams and/or work shifts, policies in regard to flexibility of work benefits and/or work environment, alternative work arrangements, and other decisions that may arise due to the changing business environment). The Company may adopt, vary or rescind these policies and directives in its absolute discretion and without any limitation (implied or otherwise) on its ability to do so

Additional Responsibilities:

• Support automation and operational tasks in cloud environments and VMware environment
• Leverage AI-assisted tools to accelerate automation and operational analysis.

Required Qualifications:

• Deep experience with IBM AIX, LPAR/VIOS, PowerVM, NIM, JFS2, GPFS, LVM, AIX networking (SEA, VLAN, EtherChannel)
• Experience with AD integration, TSM/Spectrum Protect, and monitoring/observability tools
• Dev/Ops Configuration and Automation Engineer with AIX Platform skills
• Solid expertise in Chef, BigFix, Ansible, and large-scale automation frameworks
• Solid understanding of Ruby-based automation and Chef cookbooks, recipes, pipelines, and Chef Automate integrations
• Solid understanding of Ruby scripting, Git/GitHub workflows, and CI/CD automation
• Solid ability to design automation aligned with platform requirements
• Solid ability to engineer a solution to meet AIX/UNIX platform requirements
• Familiarity with ITIL processes and performing changes in production environments

Soft Skills:

• Solid communication and documentation capabilities
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills with cross-platform learnability
• Ability to influence, collaborate, and lead cross-functional technical discussions
• Proven ability to drive standardization and reliability improvements

Preferred Qualifications:

• 8+ years with AIX and IBM Power platforms.
• 5+ years with Chef/BigFix/Ansible automation
• 5+ Ruby scripting, Git/GitHub workflows, and CI/CD automation
• Experience with CSP services
• Solid background as a platform engineer, systems architect, or senior UNIX administrator
• Working knowledge of VMware operations

At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and make the health system work better for everyone. We believe everyone - of every race, gender, sexuality, age, location and income - deserves the opportunity to live their healthiest life. Today, however, there are still far too many barriers to good health which are disproportionately experienced by people of color, historically marginalized groups and those with lower incomes. We are committed to mitigating our impact on the environment and enabling and delivering equitable care that addresses health disparities and improves health outcomes - an enterprise priority reflected in our mission.