Principal Site Reliability Engineer - Remote
About the position Optum Financial is seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer to evolve its reliability platform by combining modern site reliability engineering practices with AI-assisted operations. The role involves designing systems that help engineers detect issues faster, automate response workflows, improve resiliency, and turn operational data into actionable insights. As a technical leader, this person will influence reliability standards, mentor engineers, and drive observability and automation strategies across Azure and AWS environments. The position is remote within the United States. Employees hired in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area must work in the office at least four days per week. Remote employees must follow UnitedHealth Group’s Telecommuter Policy.
Responsibilities
- Build AI-assisted SRE capabilities that accelerate incident detection, triage, mitigation, and recovery.
- Connect observability, deployment, runbook, ownership, and incident data into actionable operational context.
- Design human-in-the-loop workflows for safe mitigation, approvals, recovery verification, and auditability.
- Standardize OpenTelemetry, SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and reliability scorecards across critical services.
- Improve alert quality by reducing noise, clarifying customer impact, and identifying likely causes faster.
- Lead resiliency testing, disaster recovery exercises, chaos engineering, and automated recovery validation.
- Mentor engineers and lead cross-functional reliability improvements across Optum Financial.
Requirements
- At least 10 years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles.
- At least 3 years of experience in a principal, staff, lead, or senior technical leadership role.
- At least 5 years of experience with cloud platforms and container orchestration, preferably Azure or AWS.
- At least 3 years of experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar platforms.
- At least 1 year of experience designing production automation, tooling, or AI-assisted workflows for incident response or operational decision-making.
Nice-to-haves
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
- Experience with LLM-based systems, AI agents, RAG, tool orchestration, evaluations, or guardrails.
- Experience with resiliency engineering, disaster recovery, chaos engineering, or recovery validation.
- Experience with infrastructure as code and automation tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible, Helm, or Kubernetes operators.
- Solid background in incident command, runbooks, postmortems, production readiness, and reliability governance.
Benefits
- Comprehensive benefits package, subject to eligibility requirements.
- Incentive and recognition programs.
- Equity stock purchase program.
- 401(k) contribution.