Sr Director of Architecture and Strategy - Minneapolis, MN

Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation. Our teams develop cutting-edge solutions that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. From advanced data analytics and AI to cybersecurity, we use innovative approaches to solve some of health care's most complex challenges. Your contributions here have the potential to change lives. Ready to build the next breakthrough? Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together. You will collaborate closely with engineering, security, compliance, and business leaders to translate validated architectural strategies into enterprise-wide patterns, data contracts, governance models, and technology roadmaps that enable trusted, secure, and responsible use of data and AI at scale.

Define and evolve the target-state data architecture vision - how data is modeled, stored, governed, and served across the enterprise - with a clear path from current state to future state Stay grounded in reality: personally build and run hands-on pilots and proof-of-concept implementations that validate architectural recommendations before asking the organization to adopt them Design semantic and metadata layers, ontologies, and knowledge systems that let humans and AI agents reason over the same enterprise data, proven out through your own working prototypes Evaluate emerging AI research, technologies, and architecture trends - including RAG, agentic patterns, and vector/embedding systems - to inform solution design and strategic investment decisions Author reference architectures, design patterns, and data contracts that dozens of engineering teams can adopt and build against, grounded in what your pilots have proven works Establish data governance, data quality, privacy, security, and AI safety frameworks that protect business assets while accelerating delivery for the teams building on top of them Drive strategic architectural alignment across large engineering organizations through technical influence, documentation, and validated proof points rather than delivery authority Partner closely with engineering, security, legal, compliance, and infrastructure leaders to evaluate, build, buy, or retire core data technologies and shape multi-year platform investments Leverage enterprise-approved AI tools and automation platforms to accelerate your own pilot work and to model responsible, efficient adoption of AI for the teams that follow your patterns You'll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.

15+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, data analytics, information management, or closely related technical disciplines 10+ years of experience defining, evaluating, and validating enterprise-scale data architecture strategies through proofs of concept, pilots, architecture reviews, and production adoption 7+ years of experience in senior architecture, enterprise architecture, or technical leadership roles with responsibility for setting technology strategy and influencing enterprise-wide architectural direction 5+ years of hands-on experience designing and validating data models across multiple paradigms, including dimensional modeling, Data Vault, semantic layers, knowledge graphs, and vector/embedding representations 5+ years of experience with modern cloud data platforms and distributed data architectures, including Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Azure Synapse, or equivalent technologies, as well as lakehouse and streaming architectures 3+ years of hands-on experience designing, prototyping, or piloting Generative AI and LLM-powered solutions, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), grounding strategies, evaluation frameworks, vector search, and agentic architectures 3+ years of