Principal Software Engineer

Requisition Number: 2369856
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.
We are seeking a Principal Engineer for the Eligibility team who can combine hands-on engineering depth with strong architecture, design, and team leadership capabilities. This role is ideal for a lead engineer who enjoys solving complex technical problems, writing production code, mentoring engineers, and shaping the technical direction of mission-critical platform capabilities.
The Principal Engineer will be part of 1-2 scrum teams and will spend approx 50% of the time coding & implementing solutions, 25% leading architecture & design, and 25% providing team leadership, mentoring, and engineering management responsibilities.
The selected candidate should have deep experience with microservices, APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and data-intensive streaming applications. They should be comfortable leading design discussions, reviewing architecture, writing code, mentoring engineers, and partnering with product and business stakeholders to deliver scalable and reliable platform capabilities.
This role requires someone who can operate at both strategic and execution levels. The right candidate will be able to define architecture direction, break down complex problems, implement critical components, guide scrum teams, and help improve engineering quality across the platform.
Primary Responsibilities:

• Hands-On Engineering Delivery
  • Actively contribute code as part of scrum teams
  • Design, develop, test, and deliver production-ready software
  • Build and enhance microservices, APIs, streaming applications, and data processing components
  • Own complex technical stories from design through implementation
  • Contribute to sprint commitments and participate in backlog refinement, sprint planning, demos, and retrospectives
  • Write clean, maintainable, secure, and scalable code
  • Support code reviews and ensure engineering best practices are followed
  • Troubleshoot complex application, data, integration, and production issues
  • Help improve performance, reliability, observability, and operational readiness of CIP services
• Architecture, Design, and Technical Leadership
  • Lead solution design for high-impact capabilities
  • Define architecture patterns for microservices, streaming applications, APIs, and data-intensive workflows
  • Guide teams on system design, event-driven architecture, scalability, resiliency, and fault tolerance
  • Partner with architects, product owners, engineering leads, and business stakeholders to translate business needs into technical solutions
  • Create and review design documents for complex features and platform changes
  • Help standardize design patterns across CIP teams
  • Drive technical decisions that reduce complexity and improve long-term maintainability
  • Identify technical debt and recommend practical remediation plans
  • Provide technical direction during production incidents and critical issue resolution
• People Leadership and Team Enablement
  • Provide technical coaching and mentoring to engineers across one or two scrum teams
  • Support growth of engineers by helping improve engineering discipline across design, coding, testing, deployment, and support
  • Participate in hiring, interviewing, onboarding, and talent assessment
  • Provide input into performance feedback and development plans where applicable
  • Help team members understand architecture direction and engineering expectations
  • Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, learning, and high-quality delivery
  • Partner with engineering management to balance delivery goals, technical quality, and team development
• 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 regards 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

Required Qualifications:

• 11+ years of software engineering experience
• Proven experience designing and building microservices-based systems
• Experience delivering data-intensive applications with high volume, high reliability, and strong operational needs
• Solid experience with event-driven or streaming-based applications
• Solid coding experience in Java & Spring Boot
• Experience with REST APIs and API design principles
• Experience with Kafka or equivalent streaming platforms
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases
• Experience working in Agile delivery teams
• Proven solid hands-on development experience with enterprise-scale applications
• Proven solid architecture and design skills for distributed systems
• Proven ability to contribute directly to sprint delivery while also providing architecture guidance
• Proven solid communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Proven automation mindset and a continuous leaner. Experience with latest AI tool sets to improve productivity

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Google cloud platform
• Experience with React
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices
• Experience with GraphQL, event sourcing, change data capture, schema management, or data integration patterns
• Experience modernizing legacy systems into API-first, microservices, or event-driven platforms
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading engineering teams
• Experience supporting production systems with high availability and operational complexity
• Healthcare or payer platform experience

Core Technical Skills

• Java / Spring Boot
• Microservices architecture
• API design and development
• Event-driven architecture
• Kafka or streaming platforms
• Data-intensive application design
• Cloud-native development
• Database design and query optimization
• Observability, monitoring, and production support
• CI/CD and DevOps automation
• Security and resiliency patterns

Core Leadership Skills

• Hands-on technical leadership
• Practical problem solving
• Delivery ownership
• Architecture
• X-team collaboration
• Mentoring and coaching
• Communication
• Engineering quality focus & ownership
• Ability to influence without relying only on authority

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.