Principal Data Engineer

About Optum and Role Overview

Optum is a global health services organization that uses technology to improve health outcomes by connecting individuals with care, pharmacy benefits, data, and essential resources. Joining Optum means engaging in a diverse and inclusive culture backed by talented colleagues, comprehensive benefits, and significant career growth opportunities. As a Principal Data Engineer based in Dublin, you will lead the development of robust data platforms that support new healthcare products serving the U.S. market. This role combines engineering excellence, analytics, and business strategy to establish scalable and secure data infrastructure enabling advanced analytics, AI, and data science capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Take on a hands-on leadership role driving technical direction and delivering critical platform components for strategic initiatives.
• Lead architectural transition efforts towards reusable multitenant data solutions with well-defined tenant isolation, access control, and privacy safeguards.
• Design and implement scalable, reliable data products and platform modules leveraging modern cloud, Lakehouse technology, and best software engineering practices.
• Collaborate closely with product, business, AI, architecture, security, governance, and engineering teams to translate complex requirements into feasible technical strategies.
• Set and advocate for standards in data modeling, quality, lineage, observability, testing, security, and operational readiness.
• Develop reference implementations and reusable patterns to promote consistent delivery and minimize redundant efforts.
• Offer technical mentorship, design insights, and constructive code reviews to elevate team capabilities, without formal people management responsibilities.
• Assess architectural alternatives and emerging technologies while balancing scalability, reliability, security, cost-efficiency, and delivery speed.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant area or comparable professional experience.
• Proven track record of leading complex data platform initiatives hands-on from design through delivery.
• Extensive expertise designing/building scalable data warehouses, Lakehouse solutions, and batch/streaming pipelines in public cloud environments.
• Advanced skills in SQL and at least one general-purpose programming language such as Python, Java, or Scala.
• Strong understanding of data modeling, distributed processing, metadata, data quality, lineage, and observability concepts.
• Experience architecting trusted data and semantic layers for analytics, data science, or AI applications.
• Competency making architectural decisions with considerations for security, reliability, scalability, performance, cost, and maintainability.
• Solid foundation in software engineering practices including automated testing, version control, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and operational support.
• In-depth knowledge of cloud security, identity and access management, tenant isolation, and data privacy principles relevant to sensitive information.
• Demonstrated ability to work with diverse stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into actionable technical strategies.
• Strong mentoring ability and ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to varied audiences.

Preferred Skills and Additional Experience

• Hands-on experience with Azure data services, Databricks, Apache Spark or comparable big data technologies.
• Familiarity with Snowflake, dbt, Terraform or equivalent tools and platforms.
• Experience designing reusable multitenant data platform architectures with tenant isolation patterns.
• Exposure to enabling Generative AI or conversational analytics solutions using enterprise data involving retrieval, semantic modeling, or grounding techniques.
• Knowledge of data cataloging, governance, and security frameworks for sensitive or regulated information.
• Background working within the healthcare industry is highly desirable.

What Optum Offers

• Professional growth and development opportunities.
• An inclusive, supportive team environment.
• Key benefits including private health insurance, wellness initiatives, pension matching, company-provided lunches, training programs, and employee donations matching.

Additional Information

The role is based in Dublin, Ireland, with a hybrid work model allowing time split between the office and telecommuting. Candidates must be eligible to work permanently in Ireland without restrictions and may need to provide proof. Optum is committed to diversity, health equity, and sustainable environmental practices in its operations. The company operates as an equal opportunity employer and maintains a drug-free workplace.