Senior Manager DevOps Engineering

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 Senior Manager of DevOps Engineering is a hands-on engineering leader accountable for the strategy, design, delivery, and operational maturity of secure cloud platforms and software delivery capabilities supporting Claims Global Claims Operations (GCO). This leader will manage and develop a team of DevOps, platform, and site reliability engineers while partnering with application, data, AI/ML, architecture, security, and product teams.

The role will establish standardized CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, cloud governance, observability, reliability, and DevSecOps practices that accelerate delivery while maintaining the controls required for healthcare and other regulated workloads. The successful candidate will combine strong people leadership with deep technical judgment, measurable operational ownership, and the ability to influence across a complex enterprise.

Leadership mandate: Build a reliable, secure, reusable engineering platform that improves developer velocity, production resilience, and governance by design.

Primary Responsibilities:

• People Leadership & Engineering Management
  • Lead, coach, and develop a multidisciplinary DevOps/platform engineering team; establish clear goals, operating rhythms, career development plans, and accountability for outcomes
  • Own workforce planning, hiring, onboarding, performance management, succession planning, and skills development aligned to the platform roadmap
  • Create an inclusive, high-performing engineering culture grounded in ownership, collaboration, continuous learning, and blameless improvement
  • Translate business priorities into an executable roadmap, capacity plan, delivery milestones, and measurable engineering outcomes
• DevOps Platform Strategy & Delivery
  • Define and execute the DevOps and platform engineering strategy for cloud-native applications, data products, and AI-enabled solutions
  • Build and govern reusable 'paved-road' capabilities including source control standards, build automation, artifact management, deployment pipelines, environment provisioning, configuration management, and release orchestration
  • Establish standardized CI/CD patterns for application, infrastructure, data, and AI/ML workloads, with automated quality gates and promotion controls
  • Drive platform adoption through strong documentation, self-service workflows, developer enablement, office hours, and actionable product telemetry
• Cloud Infrastructure & Automation
  • Lead the design and operation of secure, scalable, and cost-efficient AWS infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code and policy-as-code practices
  • Establish reusable Terraform modules and cloud deployment patterns covering networking, compute, containers, serverless, storage, databases, identity, secrets, logging, and monitoring
  • Guide container orchestration and runtime engineering using Kubernetes/EKS and related cloud-native technologies where appropriate
  • Partner with architecture, cloud, security, and FinOps teams to improve cloud governance, capacity management, resilience, and cost transparency
• DevSecOps, Risk & Compliance
  • Embed security across the software delivery lifecycle, including code scanning, dependency and container scanning, secrets management, infrastructure scanning, image provenance, and release approvals
  • Implement role-based access, segregation of duties, audit evidence, traceability, and policy enforcement consistent with enterprise and regulated-environment requirements
  • Partner with cybersecurity, risk, compliance, and audit teams to remediate findings and maintain production-readiness controls
  • Ensure platform capabilities protect sensitive healthcare data and support applicable privacy, retention, and access-control expectations
• Site Reliability & Operational Excellence
  • Define service-level objectives, reliability indicators, error budgets, operational dashboards, and production health standards for critical services
  • Advance end-to-end observability through metrics, logs, traces, synthetic monitoring, alerting, and service health telemetry
  • Lead incident response and problem management practices, including command structure, stakeholder communication, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, and learning reviews
  • Drive resilience engineering through high availability, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, capacity planning, performance engineering, and game-day exercises
• AI/ML and Data Delivery Enablement
  • Enable secure delivery patterns for AI/ML and generative AI workloads, including model and prompt configuration promotion, evaluation gates, lineage, observability, rollback, and controlled release
  • Partner with data and AI engineering teams to establish MLOps, LLMOps, and DataOps integration points without duplicating domain-team ownership
  • Provide platform controls for agentic and AI-enabled solutions, including environment isolation, secrets, auditability, monitoring, kill-switch or containment mechanisms, and production support readiness
• Enterprise Collaboration & Executive Communication
  • Partner with product, application, data, AI/ML, architecture, quality engineering, operations, security, and business stakeholders to align priorities and delivery commitments
  • Lead architecture and operational-readiness reviews; communicate tradeoffs, risks, dependencies, investment needs, and progress to senior leadership
  • Manage vendor and strategic partner delivery, including scope, technical quality, capacity, performance, and knowledge transfer
  • Drive continuous improvement using engineering metrics, delivery analytics, operational trends, and stakeholder feedback
• Success Measures
  • Improved deployment frequency, lead time for change, change failure rate, and mean time to restore, measured using agreed delivery and reliability baselines
  • Increased adoption and reuse of standardized pipelines, infrastructure modules, security controls, and observability patterns
  • Reduced manual provisioning, deployment effort, configuration drift, production incidents, and repeat operational defects
  • Measurable improvement in service availability, recovery readiness, cloud cost efficiency, audit readiness, and developer experience
  • Predictable roadmap execution, effective talent development, and strong stakeholder confidence in platform delivery
• Comply with all applicable Company policies, procedures, and business directives, changes including those relating to work location, team assignments, work schedules, and flexible work arrangements

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 12+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, DevOps, cloud engineering, platform engineering, site reliability engineering, or related disciplines
• 5+ years of experience leading engineers and engineering managers or senior technical leads, including performance management, hiring, coaching, and delivery accountability
• 5+ years of hands-on experience designing and operating cloud solutions on AWS in enterprise environments
• Demonstrated experience establishing mature CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, DevSecOps, observability, and release-management capabilities at scale
• Solid experience with GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, or comparable CI/CD platforms; Terraform or comparable Infrastructure-as-Code tooling; and modern artifact and source-control practices
• Experience with containers and cloud-native platforms, including Docker and Kubernetes/EKS, plus production operations for distributed systems
• Experience leading production operations, incident management, root-cause analysis, disaster recovery, and reliability improvement programs
• Solid understanding of cloud security, identity and access management, secrets management, vulnerability management, policy enforcement, and audit controls
• Working proficiency in one or more automation languages such as Python, Go, PowerShell, or Bash
• Proven ability to communicate technical strategy, delivery status, operational risk, and investment tradeoffs clearly to technical and executive audiences

Preferred Qualifications:

• Relevant certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect/DevOps Engineer, Kubernetes, Terraform, ITIL, or security certifications
• Experience supporting healthcare claims, financial, or other regulated and high-availability technology environments
• Experience building internal developer platforms, reusable cloud foundations, golden paths, or platform-as-a-product capabilities
• Experience with AWS services such as IAM, VPC, EKS, ECS, Lambda, S3, CloudWatch, RDS, DynamoDB, KMS, Secrets Manager, and related governance services
• Experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or comparable tools
• Experience with software supply-chain security, SBOMs, artifact signing, SAST/DAST/SCA, container security, and policy-as-code
• Proven exposure to data platform delivery, event streaming, Kafka, MLOps, LLMOps, RAG, generative AI, or agentic AI production patterns
• Core Leadership & Technical Competencies
• People Leadership - Team building, coaching, performance management, talent development, succession planning, and inclusive leadership
• Platform Engineering - Internal developer platforms, reusable delivery patterns, self-service automation, platform adoption, and product thinking
• CI/CD & Release Engineering - GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, artifact management, test integration, quality gates, progressive delivery, and rollback
• Cloud & Infrastructure - AWS architecture, Terraform, containers, Kubernetes/EKS, serverless, networking, IAM, resilience, and cost optimization
• DevSecOps - Secure SDLC, SAST/DAST/SCA, secrets, vulnerability management, policy-as-code, auditability, and software supply-chain controls
• SRE & Observability - SLIs/SLOs, logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, incident management, capacity, availability, disaster recovery, and performance
• Automation & Engineering - Python/Go/PowerShell/Bash, APIs, configuration management, testing, design standards, and engineering quality
• AI/Data Enablement - DataOps, MLOps/LLMOps integration, AI release controls, lineage, evaluation, runtime monitoring, and containment patterns
• Execution & Influence - Roadmap ownership, prioritization, dependency management, vendor leadership, executive communication, and cross-functional influence

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.