Director Software 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. Optum is seeking a Director, Software Engineering based in Gurugram/Noida/Hyderabad to lead a multi-team engineering organization responsible for the design, build, and reliable operation of enterprise-scale platforms serving millions of members and internal partners. This is a hands-on leadership role in a global delivery model. You will own the people agenda for your organization in India - hiring, coaching, performance, and org design - while remaining the accountable technical decision-maker for solution and architecture choices within your domain. You will set and enforce the reliability bar for your platforms through modern Site Reliability Engineering practices, drive cloud-native modernization, and lead practical AI adoption across both the products you build and the way your teams engineer them. You will partner daily with product, architecture, security, and business leaders, and are expected to hold technical authority in those forums rather than act as a delivery conduit.

People Leadership Lead, coach, and develop a multi-team engineering organization; own hiring, onboarding, performance management, succession planning, and retention Operate a global delivery model with US-based counterparts: clear ownership boundaries, follow-the-sun handoffs, and equitable on-call distribution across time zones Site Reliability Engineering Own reliability, availability, performance, and operational readiness for all platforms in the portfolio Establish and govern SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets; use error-budget policy to drive engineering priority decisions Mature the observability stack (metrics, logs, traces, synthetic monitoring) and drive measurable reduction in MTTD and MTTR Own incident management for the domain: severity triage, executive communication during major incidents, blameless postmortems, and closure of corrective actions Drive toil reduction and automation; set and track deployment frequency, change failure rate, automated remediation coverage, and unplanned work percentage Embed resiliency engineering - capacity planning, failure-mode analysis, chaos/DR exercises, validated RTO/RPO Ensure production systems meet enterprise security, audit, and regulatory control requirements (HIPAA, PHI/PII handling and SOX where applicable) Solution & Technical Decision-Making Act as the accountable decision-maker for solution and architecture decisions within the domain: build vs. buy, platform selection, service boundaries, integration patterns, and data flows Establish and enforce reference architectures, engineering standards, review practices, and non-functional requirements across teams Own the technical debt and modernization backlog; make explicit, documented trade-offs between speed, cost, risk, and maintainability Run architecture review and design authority forums for the domain; align with Enterprise Architecture on cross-domain decisions Produce clear decision records and defend technical directions to executive stakeholders in business terms (cost, risk, time-to-market, member impact) Cloud & Platform Engineering Lead cloud-native design and delivery on public cloud (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP considered) containers/AKS, serverless, API management, event-driven architectures Lead migration and modernization of legacy and on-premises workloads to cloud-native targets Own cloud cost management and FinOps discipline