Principal Data Engineer

Optum offers a hybrid Principal Data Engineer role in Eden Prairie, MN with a competitive annual compensation range of USD 112,700 to 193,200. This position emphasizes collaboration, growth, and real impact across data platforms, combining design, build, and operation of data–intensive systems with strong governance and scalable cloud architectures.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package
• Incentive and recognition programs
• Equity stock purchase
• 401k contribution

Responsibilities

• Work closely with product owners, system analysts, and engineering teams to deliver data solutions aligned with an Agile roadmap
• Partner with data architects and platform engineers to translate requirements into scalable data architecture
• Serve as a technical leader and primary contact for scrum teams, guiding solutions and mentoring junior engineers
• Design, build, test, and operate data–intensive systems including streaming and batch pipelines using Databricks, Kafka, Snowflake, and cloud storage
• Develop and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines, data transformations, and orchestration workflows with Python, SQL, and distributed processing frameworks
• Advance CI/CD, DevOps, and DataOps practices to enable reliable automated deployments of data pipelines and analytics workloads
• Build and maintain configuration management, infrastructure automation, deployment strategies, and monitoring/observability tools for data platforms
• Apply reliability engineering, fault tolerance, performance tuning, and automated testing to data solutions
• Participate in incident management, root cause analysis, and remediation using ServiceNow
• Define and implement data quality, governance, security, and resilience strategies for trusted data products
• Support data solutions throughout the full SDLC from design and development through production and operations
• Engage in design reviews, architecture discussions, code reviews, defect triage, and performance optimization
• Adhere to data modeling, coding, and platform standards while continuously improving how data solutions are built and delivered

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in engineering or equivalent experience
• 5+ years designing and implementing cloud-based data solutions on Azure, Google Cloud, or AWS
• 5+ years with modern data and platform technologies such as Azure Databricks, Apache Kafka, Snowflake, GitHub, and GitHub Actions
• 2+ years hands-on experience with Python and/or Scala for data engineering
• Strong SQL skills for querying and transforming data, plus solid understanding of version control, CI/CD, and automated deployment practices for data platforms
• Proven ability to collaborate effectively within Agile, distributed onshore/offshore teams

Technologies

• Databricks
• Apache Kafka
• Snowflake
• GitHub
• GitHub Actions
• Python
• Scala
• SQL
• Azure
• Google Cloud
• AWS
• ServiceNow
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
• RESTful APIs

Preferred Qualifications

• Cloud certifications, especially Azure Data Engineer Associate or Azure Solutions Architect Expert
• Healthcare industry experience
• Exposure to AI techniques and frameworks such as LLMs, RAG, or autonomous agents
• Working knowledge of RESTful APIs and data integration patterns
• Strong understanding of conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling and data warehousing best practices
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities, with a track record of delivering innovative data solutions in collaboration with delivery teams

Application timeline

This posting will remain active for a minimum of 2 business days or until a sufficient candidate pool is identified. The job posting may close early if there is a high volume of applications.