Principal I O Engineering - Remote

Requisition Number: 2381904
Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation. Our teams develop cutting-edge solutions that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. From advanced data analytics and AI to cybersecurity, we use innovative approaches to solve some of health care's most complex challenges. Your contributions here have the potential to change lives. Ready to build the next breakthrough? Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.
You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely * from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges. For all hires in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area, you will be required to work in the office a minimum of four days per week.
Primary Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, and support enterprise backup, recovery, retention, and cyber resilience solutions
• Lead medium to large-scale data protection projects from planning through implementation with minimal oversight
• Provide technical leadership and architectural guidance across enterprise and cloud-based data protection services
• Develop backup and disaster recovery strategies for on-premises, virtualized, cloud-native, and hybrid workloads
• Design and support cloud data protection solutions across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments
• Evaluate emerging technologies and make recommendations that improve recoverability, security, scalability, and operational efficiency
• Conduct capacity planning and growth forecasting activities, including backup storage requirements, retention planning, workload growth analysis, and performance optimization
• Understand workload behavior, placement considerations, and recovery requirements across physical, virtual, containerized, and cloud environments
• Collaborate with infrastructure, cloud, application, database, and security teams to ensure data protection requirements are incorporated into solution designs
• Troubleshoot complex backup, recovery, replication, and performance-related issues
• Develop and maintain engineering standards, operational procedures, architecture documents, and technical roadmaps
• Present technical solutions, recommendations, project status, and risk assessments to senior leadership and executive stakeholders
• Support audit, compliance, governance, and cyber resiliency initiatives

You'll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.
Required Qualifications:

• 9+ years of experience in enterprise backup, recovery, and data protection engineering
• Experience supporting large-scale enterprise environments, including thousands of servers, petabyte-scale storage estates, or large multi-cloud deployments
• Experience with cloud-native services and the unique backup, recovery, retention, and resiliency requirements associated with public cloud platforms
• Experience troubleshooting complex infrastructure, database, virtual machine, Kubernetes, and application protection challenges
• Proven experience protecting workloads in AWS, Azure, and GCP cloud environments
• Working knowledge of capacity planning, storage optimization, growth forecasting, and infrastructure scaling
• Solid understanding of workload placement, workload behavior, and recovery objectives (RPO/RTO)
• Solid understanding of enterprise backup architectures, disaster recovery, cyber recovery, immutable storage, ransomware protection, and recovery testing methodologies
• Demonstrated ability to independently manage projects and technical initiatives with minimal supervision
• Proven excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Proven ability to communicate complex technical concepts, solutions, risks, and recommendations to senior management and executive leadership

Preferred Qualifications:

• Cloud certifications or backup platform certifications
• Experience protecting Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SAP HANA, MongoDB, and other enterprise databases
• Experience working within highly regulated environments requiring compliance, governance, and audit support
• Knowledge of cyber vault, isolated recovery environment (IRE), immutable storage, and air-gapped recovery architectures
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, OpenShift, and container data protection solutions
• IaC (Infrastructure as Code) leveraging Terraform and other industry standard automation tools

*All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy
Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to local labor markets, education, work experience, certifications, etc. In addition to your salary, we offer benefits such as, a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). No matter where or when you begin a career with us, you'll find a far-reaching choice of benefits and incentives. The salary for this role will range from $112,700 - $193,200 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.
Application Deadline: This will be posted for a minimum of 2 business days or until a sufficient candidate pool has been collected. Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.
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.
UnitedHealth Group is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer under applicable law and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations.
UnitedHealth Group is a drug-free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment.