Humana · 2 days ago
Lead Software Engineer – Next Best Action
United States
Full-time
Remote
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$129K/yr - $178K/yr
8+ years expHumana Inc. is committed to putting health first and is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to design and develop a high-performance, real-time decision engine. The role involves system ownership, API management, and technical leadership to ensure low-latency and high-availability targets while collaborating with various teams to maintain robust decision-making processes.
Health CareHealth InsuranceInsuranceVenture Capital
Responsibilities
Design, implement, and maintain a stateless, side-effect-free decision service in Java (Kotlin also considered), following a well-defined processing pipeline: Context → Rules → Deterministic Scoring → Reconciliation → Decision Response
Ensure the engine maintains immutability, with no internal state mutations or external message dispatch
Define and continuously improve the Decision Response schema to include: Human-readable rationale for both selected and rejected recommendations, Policy/rule references and score breakdowns, Input/context hashes for audit, replay, and verification
Lead the integration and evolution of the rules execution layer, utilizing technologies such as Drools/DMN, IBM ODM, Google CEL, OPA/Rego, or JVM-based DSLs
Establish practices for rule versioning, reason code standards, static validation, and simulation/backtesting of rule changes
Ensure deterministic, secure, and compliant rule evaluation at all times
Publish and maintain OpenAPI specifications for decision endpoints, and provide read-only contracts for action metadata and state snapshots
Integrate model scores through stable interfaces, ensuring models inform decisions without overriding business constraints
Coordinate closely with downstream teams responsible for state machines, delivery, and channel execution, keeping all state management outside the decision engine
Engineer for strict low-latency and high-availability targets (e.g., p50: 60–120 ms, p95: ≤300 ms, API uptime ≥ 99.9%)
Implement strategies for graceful degradation and safe defaults when rule artifacts or model scoring become unavailable
Maintain golden datasets and a determinism test harness within CI to guarantee consistent outputs for identical inputs and versions
Develop and maintain an append-only Decision Ledger to record input summaries, rule/model versions, context hashes, and full explanations for each decision
Instrument services with OpenTelemetry and structured, PII-safe logging; build dashboards to monitor latency, throughput, rule activity, and score distributions
Provide robust replay tools for audit support and verification of decision outcomes
Lead design reviews and establish standards for idempotency, versioning, contract-first development, and backward compatibility
Collaborate with Rules, ML, Platform/Infrastructure, and Product teams; mentor senior and mid-level engineers on testing, profiling, and code review best practices
Drive adherence to quality gates including contract tests, load tests, chaos engineering drills, and readiness checks
Utilize AI tools to accelerate code scaffolding, test automation, migrations, and documentation
Ensure all eligibility and compliance logic remains human-authored and auditable; AI is not used for policy decision-making
Qualification
Required
8+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead role
Deep expertise in Java/JVM, including performance tuning, concurrency, garbage collection, and profiling; strong background in developing low-latency APIs (e.g., Spring Boot, Netty)
Proven experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar), idempotent design patterns, and contract-first API development (OpenAPI)
Direct experience implementing rules engines with at least one of: Drools/DMN, IBM ODM, CEL, OPA/Rego, or a custom JVM DSL (including parser/AST/bytecode/interpreter development)
Demonstrated discipline in achieving determinism, versioning, explainability, and auditability
Preferred
Track record of delivering real-time decisioning, recommendation, or policy services at scale
Experience designing DSLs (e.g., with ANTLR or custom parsing) or optimizing rules engines for performance and maintainability
Experience integrating production model services (feature stores, model registries; A/B or shadow evaluation)
Background in regulated or mission-critical industries (healthcare, finance, telecommunications), with emphasis on separation of duties and strong data controls
Proficiency with related stacks: Python for offline analysis
Benefits
Medical, dental and vision benefits
401(k) retirement savings plan
Time off (including paid time off, company and personal holidays, volunteer time off, paid parental and caregiver leave)
Short-term and long-term disability
Life insurance
Company
Humana
Humana is a health insurance provider for individuals, families, and businesses.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Humana has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (282)
2024 (246)
2023 (284)
2022 (274)
2021 (212)
2020 (84)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$13.07B2025-05-30Post Ipo Debt· $5B
2025-03-03Post Ipo Debt· $1.25B
2024-03-11Post Ipo Debt· $2.25B
Leadership Team
Jim Rechtin
CEO and President
Colin Drylie
Senior Vice President, Experience Transformation
Recent News
2026-01-16
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2026-01-14
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