Vice President, Digital Engineering - Optum Consumer

About the role

The Vice President, Digital Engineering - Optum Consumer leads a Product Engineering team for the Optum Financial and Optum Health digital experiences. They are responsible for creating and transforming digital experiences that serve patients, health plan members, employers, and providers. This leader designs and delivers a common component technology platform and the next generation of consumer experiences. They also oversee the integration of AI/ML-driven features and ensure compliance with healthcare regulations.

Responsibilities

• Engineering Leadership - Define and execute a long-term engineering vision aligned with the company's digital health strategy and growth goals
• Build, lead, and scale a high-performing global engineering organization with a culture of innovation, accountability, and inclusion
• Recruit and mentor senior engineering leaders, fostering both technical and people management capabilities
• Consumer Application Excellence - Lead the development of robust, scalable, secure, and user-friendly consumer-facing applications accessed by millions of users
• Ensure product performance, reliability, and uptime meet the highest standards for public-facing systems
• Drive technical decision-making that enables speed, scalability, and flexibility across the stack
• AI & Data Integration - Oversee the integration of AI/ML-driven features (e.g., personalized recommendations, NLP, intelligent triage) into consumer products
• Partner with data science and product teams to deliver data-informed user experiences that support improved health outcomes
• Ensure responsible use of AI, including data ethics, explainability, and alignment with healthcare regulations
• Operational & Organizational Efficiency - Manage delivery timelines, budgets, team structures, and prioritization across complex product portfolios
• Establish and measure KPIs, engineering health metrics, and delivery benchmarks to drive continuous improvement
• Implement and evolve best-in-class software development practices, DevOps, and infrastructure operations
• Cross-functional Collaboration - Partner closely with Product, Clinical, Security, UX, and Executive teams to ensure technical strategy supports overall business and patient-impact goals
• Act as a strategic voice for engineering in company-wide planning and decision-making

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experiences
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in senior engineering leadership roles
• Proven track record building and scaling consumer-grade digital products with millions of users (ideally in healthcare, wellness, fintech, or e-commerce)
• Experience leading matrixed, geographically dispersed engineering teams across multiple time zones
• Proven understanding of AI/ML integration in production environments (especially within consumer-facing products)
• Demonstrated expertise in Agile methods, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), microservices architecture, DevOps, and application security
• Excellent communication, influence, leadership, and stakeholder management skills