Job Details

Join our compassionate community and prioritize health!

We are looking for an experienced Lead Software Engineer to create and implement foundational services for delivering reliable and scalable real-time recommendations. In this role, you will be responsible for designing and developing a State Machine that manages authoritative state and legal transitions, as well as a Transactional Outbox for ensuring precise intent execution for downstream consumers. Your solutions should be resilient, traceable, and high-performing under demanding concurrency and latency conditions.

This is a hands-on position that blends technical leadership with active engineering: you will not only architect systems and set technical standards but also mentor fellow engineers and collaborate closely with platform, data, and product teams.

Key Responsibilities

• State Machine Architecture
• Define execution lifecycles and business states, implementing strict legal transition guards.
• Ensure deterministic, auditable, and testable state transitions, eliminating hidden state in code.
• Enforce idempotency; design composite idempotency keys to prevent duplicate actions or invalid transitions.
• Support late events and backfills; maintain append-only history and current-state projections for efficient retrieval.
• Provide clear APIs for state snapshots, transitions, and feedback events.
• Transactional Outbox Implementation
• Apply the Transactional Outbox pattern, including atomic persist-and-publish mechanics, idempotency keys, retry/backoff strategies, and dead-letter queue management.
• Establish robust contracts for downstream executors and manage the reception of delivery receipts.
• Guarantee exactly-once effects through idempotent consumers and deduplication strategies.
• Data Modeling and Storage Expertise
• Design relational schemas for transition logs, current-state projections, and outbox records, emphasizing accuracy and scalability.
• Implement composite constraints, foreign keys, upserts, and optimized indexing/partitioning for high-throughput scenarios.
• Define transaction boundaries and isolation levels to prevent data anomalies.
• Lead zero-downtime migrations using Liquibase or Flyway, employing forward/backward-compatible rollout strategies.
• Utilize TypeORM or JPA/Hibernate/jOOQ effectively and optimize query performance as required.
• Build resilient projections and caches; leverage change data capture (CDC) tools for safe reprocessing.
• Distributed Systems and Concurrency Management
• Design systems for accuracy amid concurrent updates, partitions, and failures.
• Leverage advanced knowledge of event ordering, idempotency, retries, and backpressure management.
• Balance consistency and reliability with performance metrics.
• Observability and Operations
• Instrument systems for tracing, metrics, and structured logs; develop dashboards to monitor key system indicators.
• Build replay tools and maintain immutable audit trails for compliance and incident response.
• Manage runbooks and operational protocols for issue resolution and system health.
• Collaboration and Mentorship
• Work alongside decision-service owners to ensure statelessness and side-effect-free integration.
• Collaborate with channel teams on event schema, delivery receipts, and failure semantics.
• Lead design reviews and establish standards for contract-first development and idempotent patterns.
• Mentor engineers on data modeling, concurrency, ORM/JPA best practices, and observability; promote rigorous testing and code reviews.
• Responsible AI-Assisted Engineering
• Utilize AI tools to streamline scaffolding, testing, migration, and documentation processes.
• Ensure that core business logic and accuracy are human-authored and rigorously reviewed.

Your skills will help make a difference!

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend/platform service development; at least 3 years in a senior or lead role overseeing mission-critical systems.
• Expertise in Node.js/TypeScript, Python, and/or Java/Kotlin.
• Experience with Transactional Outbox patterns, idempotent consumers, and exactly-once delivery mechanisms.
• Strong skills in relational modeling (Postgres/MySQL), query optimization, and partitioning.
• Proficiency in TypeORM (Node.js) and/or JPA/Hibernate/jOOQ (Java/Kotlin) with experience in zero-downtime migrations.
• Knowledge of transactions, isolation levels, and locking in high-throughput environments.
• Experience developing contract-first APIs (OpenAPI) and managing schema versioning.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with stateful pipelines for notifications, fulfillment, or workflow engines.
• Familiarity with CDC (e.g., Debezium), CQRS, event sourcing, and outbox-poller architectures.
• Background in regulated or mission-critical sectors (healthcare, finance, telecommunications).
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, SRE practices, and managing on-call operations.

Additional Information

SSN Alert Statement

Humana prioritizes identity protection; applicants may need to provide their Social Security Number. Instructions will be sent via email when required.

Remote Work Internet Policy

To work effectively from home or in a hybrid model, a minimum download speed of 25 Mbps and an upload speed of 10 Mbps is necessary; a wired connection is recommended. Approval is needed for satellite or cellular connections. Employees based in California, Illinois, Montana, or South Dakota will receive bi-weekly internet reimbursements.

Humana will provide necessary phone equipment for your position and requires a dedicated workspace to protect member PHI/HIPAA information.

Occasional travel to Humana's offices for training or meetings may be required.

Scheduled Weekly Hours

40

Compensation Range

The pay range reflects an estimate of starting base pay for full-time employment and may vary depending on geographic location and individual qualifications.

$129,300 - $177,800 per year.

This position is eligible for a performance-based bonus incentive plan.

Benefits Description

Humana offers competitive benefits that focus on your overall well-being. These include medical, dental, and vision insurance; a 401(k) retirement plan; paid time off; and more.

Application Deadline: 03-19-2026

About Us

Humana Inc. is dedicated to putting health first for our employees, customers, and the community at large, providing accessible care and services within the healthcare ecosystem.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Humana is committed to non-discrimination policies based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, marital status, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.

Humana adheres to all applicable federal civil rights laws and ensures no discrimination based on race, color, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion.