Senior Data Engineering Consultant

Primary Responsibilities:

• Own architectural decisions across Databricks and Snowflake - Delta Lake design, Unity Catalog governance, Gold-layer schema standards, and Bronze/Silver/Gold pipeline patterns
• Lead and harden Apollos cloud migration, building on the current cloud footprint toward full production stability
• Set engineering standards for pipeline design, testing, orchestration (DAGs), and CI/CD across the data platform
• Design and review data models and pipelines feeding downstream consumers - Horizon Compass, AI/ML pipelines, and reporting tools
• Mentor and grow data engineers on the team; act as technical escalation point for hard pipeline and architecture problems
• Partner directly with the Director of Data Services on technical roadmap, and represent data engineering in cross-functional and leadership discussions
• Help scope and de-risk Apollos expansion to Optum West, East, and Mid-East regions from a data architecture standpoint
• 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

Qualifications - External

Required Qualifications:

• Graduate degree or equivalent experience
• Cloud / Databricks / Snowflake
• Expert-level production experience with Databricks - Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, job orchestration, performance tuning at scale
• Solid production Snowflake experience schema design, performance/cost optimization, and integration patterns between Snowflake and Databricks
• Deep cloud platform experience (Azure preferred) - storage, compute, networking, and security fundamentals as they apply to a data platform
• Experience as a technical lead - setting standards, doing architecture review, unblocking other engineers
• Proven track record owning Bronze/Silver/Gold or equivalent medallion-architecture pipelines end to end Leadership
• Proven to mentor without micromanaging; grows engineers rather than just directing them
• Proven comfortable being the technical voice in front of non-engineering stakeholders and leadership
• Judgment
• Experience working in a regulated or compliance-sensitive data environment (healthcare a strong plus)
• Proven pragmatic about technical debt and migration risk - knows when to stabilize vs. when to push forward
• Proven solid SQL and data modeling fundamentals underneath the tooling

Preferred Qualifications:

• Direct healthcare, HEDIS, or claims data experience
• Experience leading a cloud migration from an on-prem or legacy platform (e.g., SQL Server)
• Experience scaling a data platform across multiple business units or regions
• Proven exposure to Databricks AI functions ( ai_summarize() , ai_classify() ) or supporting AI/ML pipelines downstream of the data layer