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 diversity and inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health equity on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.
About the Team
The Optum Health team partners with clinical, operational, product, engineering, analytics, and business leaders to improve how healthcare data is trusted, governed, and used across Risk, Quality, Performance Management, and Value-Based Care operations.
The Unified Risk & Quality Platform is a strategic enterprise initiative focused on building a more consistent and governed foundation for Risk and Quality. The Data Control Tower is being established as a horizontal assurance capability that detects data quality risks early, creates evidence, routes accountability, and supports trusted business decisions.
About the Role
The Associate Director, Data Quality & Controls will help lead the design, implementation, and day-to-day operating model for the Data Control Tower. This role will shape how controls are defined, prioritized, implemented, validated, monitored, and translated into operational action.
The successful candidate will bring a balanced mix of technical fluency, stakeholder leadership, business understanding, and operational discipline. They should be comfortable working with SQL, Snowflake-based data assets, control evidence, reconciliation outputs, dashboards, issue management, and senior stakeholder communication.
What You'll Do
- Help lead the Data Control Tower as an active assurance capability for URQP data quality, controls, evidence, and decision support
- Partner with business, product, engineering, analytics, clinical, operations, architecture, and compliance stakeholders to identify priority data risks
- Define and maintain a practical control catalog covering control purpose, logic, thresholds, severity, ownership, evidence, and runbook guidance
- Work with engineering and analytics teams to implement repeatable controls using SQL, Snowflake, dbt, orchestration, and evidence-store patterns
- Translate technical control results into clear business impact assessments, including affected populations, impacted workstreams, recommended actions, and decision risk
- Support trust-state management for critical datasets and outputs, including Certified, Warning, High Risk, Do Not Use, De-certified, Under Remediation, and Pending Validation
- Coordinate structured issue management for material data quality failures, ensuring issues are assigned, tracked, escalated, validated, and closed with evidence
- Support controls across priority domains such as member identity, eligibility, claims, clinical data, provider data, reference data, gap lifecycle outputs, submissions readiness, and performance reporting
- Contribute to Control Tower dashboards and operational views, including control catalog, incident center, trust-state, and executive risk views
- Promote evidence-first data quality, transparent ownership, practical governance, and continuous improvement
What You'll Bring
If you do not meet every single requirement, do not let that hold you back. We are just as excited about potential as we are about qualifications and experience, and you could be exactly who we are looking for.
Required Qualifications
- Significant experience in data quality, data controls, data governance, analytics, data operations, or a related data leadership role
- Understanding of data quality principles such as completeness, timeliness, accuracy, consistency, validity, reconciliation, and fitness for use
- Ability to work with SQL-based analysis and partner with engineering teams on control logic, validation queries, test scenarios, and evidence outputs
- Experience translating business requirements and operational pain points into data rules, controls, dashboards, issue logs, or governance processes
- Stakeholder management skills across senior leaders, product owners, engineering teams, analysts, operational teams, and business SMEs
- Ability to explain complex data issues in clear business language and connect findings to operational impact, decision risk, or downstream readiness
- Experience working in matrixed environments where accountability spans business, technology, platform, and operations teams
- Documentation skills, including control specifications, issue narratives, runbooks, process flows, and decision logs
Technical Skills and Tools
- SQL for validation, reconciliation, investigation, and root-cause analysis
- Snowflake or similar cloud data platforms
- dbt or similar controls-as-code, analytics engineering, or transformation frameworks
- Data quality frameworks, testing approaches, and validation rule design
- BI and dashboarding tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Streamlit, or similar
- Incident management, issue tracking, runbooks, data lineage, metadata, semantic layers, and control catalogs
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in healthcare, payer, provider, value-based care, risk adjustment, quality measurement, submissions, or clinical data environments
- Familiarity with domains such as CDP, ECDH, gap repositories, clinical feeds, risk engines, quality engines, submissions platforms, or performance reporting layers
- Experience establishing data quality operating models, control frameworks, certification processes, severity models, trust states, or exception handling
- Experience working with engineering teams using CI/CD, version control, data pipelines, scheduling, and automated validation
- Experience creating executive-ready reporting, operational dashboards, governance packs, or sponsor-facing risk summaries
At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and make the health system work better for everyone. We believe everyone-of every race, gender, sexuality, age, location and income-deserves the opportunity to live their healthiest life. Today, however, there are still far too many barriers to good health which are disproportionately experienced by people of color, historically marginalized groups and those with lower incomes. We are committed to mitigating our impact on the environment and enabling and delivering equitable care that addresses health disparities and improves health outcomes - an enterprise priority reflected in our mission.
Please note you must currently be eligible to work and remain indefinitely without any restrictions in the country to which you are making an application. Proof will be required to support your application.
Diversity creates a healthier atmosphere: Optum is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender, civil status, family status, sexual orientation, disability, religion, age, race, and membership of the Traveller community, or any other characteristic protected by law. Optum is a drug-free workplace. © 2026 Optum Services (Ireland) Limited. All rights reserved.
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