Lead Site Reliability Engineer

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 looking for a highly skilled Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our newly established team in India. As a Lead SRE, you will be responsible for ensuring the reliability, performance, and scalability of our systems. You will lead and contribute to key projects, including performance testing, CI/CD tooling, and facilitating infrastructure and application migrations while working closely with both the India team and the existing SRE team in the United States.

Primary Responsibilities:

• System Reliability: Ensure the availability, performance, and scalability of critical systems by implementing best practices in site reliability engineering
• Observability & Telemetry: Drive the design and evolution of observability systems by building scalable, extensible solutions using OpenTelemetry (OTEL) and other modern observability tools.
• Champion innovation in monitoring, distributed tracing, and logging strategies to provide deep visibility into system behavior. Continuously evaluate and integrate emerging technologies to improve observability maturity and reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and resolve (MTTR)
• Project Leadership: Lead and contribute to projects such as performance testing, CI/CD tooling, and infrastructure/application migrations with focus to migrate from on-prem to cloud solutions
• Incident Response: Actively participate in incident response, troubleshooting, and post-mortem analysis to identify root causes and prevent future occurrences
• Automation and Tooling: Develop and maintain automation tools to reduce manual effort, streamline processes, and enhance system reliability
• Collaboration: Work closely with other SREs, engineers, and stakeholders across time zones to align on goals, strategies, and ensure smooth project execution
• Continuous Improvement: Identify opportunities to improve system reliability, performance, and operational efficiency, and implement changes as needed
• Mentorship: Provide guidance and mentorship to junior engineers on the team, fostering a culture of learning and growth
• AI Driven Operations: Leverage AI-powered tools and platforms to enhance observability, incident response, and operational efficiency.
• 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:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or a similar role
• Proven experience architecting and implementing observability platforms using OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Splunk, Grafana, or similar tools. Demonstrated ability to innovate in this space-whether by building custom telemetry pipelines, integrating AI/ML for anomaly detection, or developing new approaches to visualize and interpret system health
• CI/CD: Experience with CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and related automation pipelines
• Containers & Orchestration: Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
• Cloud Platforms: Solid knowledge of public cloud platforms, preferrably Azure, and expertise in On-Prem to Cloud migrations.
• Technical Expertise: Deep understanding of systems architecture, cloud infrastructure, networking, and automation tools
• Automation Skills: Proven solid in scripting/programming skills (Python, Go, Powershell, Bash, etc), and experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and Ansible
• Problem-Solving: Proven excellent problem-solving skills, with experience in incident management, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis
• Collaboration: Proven excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a distributed team across time zones
• AI Tools: Proven exposure to AI tools and their application in SRE workflows for faster delivery and smarter operations

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working in a global or distributed team environment
• Industry experience in Payments, Fintech, or Healthcare
• Knowledge of security best practices in cloud and distributed systems

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.