Humana Inc. is seeking a hands-on Lead Software Engineer – Decision Integrity & Observability. In this individual contributor role with organization-wide impact, you will be responsible for the core runtime infrastructure that guarantees every decision on our Next Best Action (NBA) platform is traceable, explainable, and defensible.
What You'll Do
- Define and enforce determinism guarantees for the entire decision kernel, from context through to response.
- Govern the use of artifacts like rule packs, reason-code taxonomies, and model versions to ensure decisions are fully explained.
- Enforce contact policy controls and event-driven suppressions to ensure channel compliance.
- Design end-to-end traceability and correlation across the Decision Engine, Rules, Action Library, and channel executors.
- Develop append-only decision ledgers with hash-verified replay paths for auditability.
- Implement semantic guards to detect and alert on business logic errors.
- Integrate OpenTelemetry instrumentation and provide operational dashboards for key indicators.
- Develop determinism validation harnesses using golden datasets.
- Ensure contract compliance for NBA interfaces via OpenAPI, schema validation, and consumer-driven contracts.
- Apply property-based validation to test rules, scoring, and reconciliation under various scenarios.
- Automate performance and resilience checks, including chaos testing, to maintain service-level objectives.
- Maintain explainability regression controls to ensure changes do not degrade explanation quality.
- Collaborate with rules, policy, and machine learning teams on reason-code coverage, model versioning, and safe rollouts.
- Coordinate with state management and outbox teams to ensure exactly-once intent and idempotent consumers.
- Support orchestration and integration needs for Node.js/TypeScript surfaces.
What We're Looking For
- A minimum of 8 years in backend/platform service development.
- At least 3 years in a senior or lead role overseeing mission-critical systems.
- Proven experience delivering backend/platform systems with a focus on correctness, reliability, and traceability.
- Demonstrated ability to reason about stateful, distributed flows and identify failure modes.
- Hands-on implementation of advanced observability using structured logging and tracing.
- Advanced Java backend development, with a focus on deterministic execution.
- Experience in event-driven, asynchronous architectures, preferably with Kafka or similar pub/sub systems.
- Mastery of delivery guarantees like at-least-once transport, idempotent consumers, and exactly-once effects via the Outbox pattern.
- Expertise in relational database design (PostgreSQL or equivalent) supporting immutability and auditability.
- In-depth knowledge of transactions, isolation levels, and failure boundaries.
- Proficiency with OpenTelemetry and correlating logs, traces, and metrics across flows.
- Capability to design observability systems that provide business-contextual explanations.
- Experience working alongside Node.js/TypeScript services for orchestration.
- Exposure to production ML inference, including deterministic ranking integration.
- Ownership of determinism/replay test harnesses, contract validation, property-based tests, and performance/chaos gates in CI/CD.
- Application of trace-driven assertions to ensure decision integrity is observable.
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with rules/policy engines or DSLs; JVM-compiled DSL experience is advantageous.
Technical Stack
- Java
- Kafka
- PostgreSQL
- OpenTelemetry
- Node.js
- TypeScript
- OpenAPI
Benefits & Compensation
- Compensation: $129,300 - $177,800 per year
- Medical, dental and vision benefits
- 401(k) retirement savings plan
- Paid time off, company and personal holidays, volunteer time off, paid parental and caregiver leave
- Short-term and long-term disability
- Life insurance
Work Mode
This is a remote position.
It is the policy of Humana not to discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, marital status, genetic information, disability or protected veteran status.
