Lead Platform Engineer - NBA

Humana Inc; Ashburn (VA); Hybrid; USD 129,000 - 178,000; Full time

Job summary

Humana Inc. seeks a Lead Software Engineer to architect and deliver foundational services enabling real-time recommendations for Medicare Advantage members.

You will own the State Machine and Transactional Outbox, ensuring exactly-once emission, robust traceability, and high concurrency performance. The role combines hands-on coding with technical leadership across Java, Python, Node.js, and TypeScript, mentoring engineers and coordinating with platform, data, and product teams to deliver a

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field.
• 8+ years of full stack software engineering experience with leadership exposure.
• Strong experience with Java, Python, Node.js, or TypeScript.
• Hands-on experience designing automated testing frameworks (unit/integration/E2E).
• Strong observability practices: logging, metrics, tracing, monitoring and alerting.
• Experience designing reliability patterns for distributed systems (fault tolerance, retries, resilience).
• Ability to lead a small engineering pod and manage contractor resources while contributing as an individual contributor.
• Experience operating cloud-native apps on Kubernetes and container platforms.
• Clear communication of operational risks and engineering tradeoffs to leaders.

Responsibilities

• Own platform scale and reliability delivery across NBA platform.
• Ensure uptime, performance, resilience, and operational excellence.

Skills

Full stack software engineering

Platform reliability

Observability & monitoring

Production testing frameworks

Team leadership

Cloud-native & Kubernetes

Java, Python, Node.js, TypeScript

Distributed systems reliability

Communication to executives

AI-assisted development tools

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Kafka

Azure DevOps

GitHub Copilot

Job description

Become a part of our caring community We are seeking a seasoned Lead Software Engineer to architect and deliver the foundational services that enable real time recommendations to become dependable, auditable, and scalable outcomes. In this position, you will own the design and implementation of the State Machine (managing authoritative state and legal transitions) and Transactional Outbox (ensuring exactly-once intent emission for downstream consumers). Your solutions must be robust, traceable, and maintain high performance under significant concurrency and latency demands. This role is hands‑on, combining technical leadership with active engineering: you will architect systems, set technical standards, mentor peers, and collaborate closely across platform, data, and product teams.

About the Platform The Next Best Action (NBA) Decision Intelligence Platform is Humana's enterprise system for personalized, omnichannel member engagement. It decides the next best action for each Medicare Advantage member — what to communicate, when, and through which channel — and delivers it reliably across the member journey. The platform pairs a real-time decisioning and orchestration stack with reinforcement-learning and agentic‑AI models trained on the Databricks Lakehouse, all operating under the compliance and auditability requirements of a regulated healthcare environment.

Role Summary The Lead Full Stack Engineer owns the NBA platform's quality, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence. This role takes responsibility for the platform once capabilities have been delivered by the feature pods, ensuring services are production‑ready, observable, resilient, and capable of operating at enterprise scale. The role spans automated testing, platform observability, reliability engineering, and production readiness across a distributed ecosystem built on Java, Python, Node.js, and TypeScript. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role: you write code, lead a small team of engineers and contractors, and are accountable for the platform's operational health, performance, and long‑term sustainability.

Key Responsibilities

• Pod delivery — Own delivery for the platform scale and reliability pod, including planning, execution, quality, and operational readiness across the NBA platform.
• Platform reliability — Own uptime, performance, resilience, and operational excellence across platform services; proactively identify bottlenecks, failure points, and scaling constraints before they become production incidents.
• Quality engineering — Build and maintain automated testing frameworks spanning unit, integration, end‑to‑end, regression, and performance testing; establish quality standards that all delivery pods must meet before release.
• Hands‑on development — Contribute production code alongside the team, building reliability tooling, test automation, observability capabilities, and platform infrastructure improvements.
• Observability and monitoring — Own the platform's logging, metrics, distributed tracing, alerting, and monitoring strategy; ensure engineering teams have deep visibility into system behavior across environments.
• Error and failure management — Define and enforce patterns for exception handling, fault tolerance, recovery, and operational diagnostics across distributed services.
• Scalability engineering — Evaluate platform behavior under load and lead initiatives that improve performance, throughput reliability, and cost efficiency as membership volume and engagement activity grow.
• Production readiness — Define and enforce release readiness criteria, operational quality gates, and handoff standards that services must satisfy before entering production ownership.
• Team leadership — Manage and mentor engineers and contractors; conduct code reviews, uphold engineering standards, and foster a culture of quality and operational excellence.
• Cross‑team coordination — Partner closely with decisioning, orchestration, activation, platform, and data teams to identify reliability risks early and ensure production concerns are addressed throughout delivery.

Use your skills to make an impact

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field
• 8+ years of full stack software engineering experience, with at least 1–2 years leading platform reliability, quality engineering, site reliability, or production operations initiatives.
• Strong experience building production software across modern backend technology stacks, including Java, Python, Node.js, or TypeScript.
• Hands‑on experience designing and implementing automated testing frameworks, including integration testing, end‑to‑end testing, load testing, and quality automation.
• Strong understanding of modern observability practices, including structured logging, metrics collection, distributed tracing, monitoring, and alerting.
• Experience designing reliability patterns for distributed systems, including fault tolerance, retries, resilience, and failure recovery mechanisms.
• Demonstrated ability to lead a small engineering pod and manage contractor resources while remaining an active individual contributor.
• Experience operating cloud‑native applications on Kubernetes and container‑based platforms.
• Clear communicator who can articulate operational risks, quality concerns, and engineering tradeoffs to technical leaders and senior executives.
• Experience using modern AI‑assisted development tools such as Claude, GitHub Copilot, or similar technologies to improve engineering productivity and quality.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes platform operations, application scaling strategies, and reliability engineering in large‑scale distributed environments.
• Experience with Kafka and event‑driven architectures, including diagnosing and mitigating failures across asynchronous systems.
• Familiarity with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, service‑level objectives (SLOs), service‑level indicators (SLIs), and incident management practices.
• Experience implementing performance testing, chaos engineering, fault injection testing, or resiliency validation programs.
• Experience with Azure DevOps pipelines, CI/CD automation, and engineering quality gates.
• Familiarity with the broader NBA platform ecosystem, including workflow orchestration, decisioning services, and activation platforms.
• Background in healthcare, insurance, or another regulated industry with compliance, auditability, and operational governance requirements.

We build with modern AI development tools (such as Claude and GitHub Copilot) and expect everyone on the team to use them to work faster and at higher quality.

Additional Information

Qualified candidates are required to currently live in, or be willing to move to, a commutable distance for a hybrid (~3 days in-office) work arrangement Location options are currently: Washington, D.C. metropolitan area Louisville, KY metropolitan area Denver, CO metropolitan area Dallas, TX metropolitan area Ft. Lauderdale, FL metropolitan area

Work Style: Remote/Hybrid - Preferably Boston, MA. Occasional travel to Humana's offices for training or meetings may be required.

Work Hours: Typical business hours are Monday-Friday, 8 hours/day, 5 days/week some flexibility might be possible, depending on business needs.

Very minimal travel might be required for training, meetings, and/or conferences.

Interview Format As part of our hiring process, we will be using on‑demand technology provided by Hire Vue, a third‑party vendor. This technology provides our team of recruiters and hiring managers with an enhanced method for decision‑making through on‑demand candidate assessments. If you are selected to move forward from your application prescreen, you will receive correspondence inviting you to participate in an on‑demand assessment with pre‑determined questions. You should anticipate the assessment to take approximately 10-15 minutes.

Your on‑demand assessment will be reviewed, and you will subsequently be informed if you will be moving forward to next round of interviews.

SSN Task via Workday Should you be extended a formal employment offer you will receive a request to enter your SSN into our Workday system to scan for duplicate profiles.

Work at Home Requirements: To ensure Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees’ ability to work effectively, the self‑provided internet service of Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees must meet the following criteria: At minimum, a download speed of 25 Mbps and an upload speed of 10 Mbps is required; wireless, wired cable or DSL connection is suggested. In certain roles, the minimum recommended internet speed required by Humana may not be sufficient for business needs. Humana reserves the right to require associates to upgrade their internet service if necessary. Work from a dedicated space lacking ongoing interruptions to protect member PHI / HIPAA information.

Travel: While this is a remote position, occasional travel to Humana's offices for training or meetings may be required.

Scheduled Weekly Hours 40 Pay Range

The compensation range below reflects a good faith estimate of starting base pay for full time (40 hours per week) employment at the time of posting.

The pay range may be higher or lower based on geographic location and individual pay will vary based on demonstrated job related skills, knowledge, education, certifications, etc.

$129,300 - $177,800 per year

This job is eligible for a bonus incentive plan.

This incentive opportunity is based upon company and/or individual performance.

Description of Benefits Humana, Inc. and its affiliated subsidiaries (collectively, “Humana”) offers competitive benefits that support whole‑person well‑being.

Associate benefits are designed to encourage personal wellness and smart healthcare decisions for you and your family while also knowing your life extends outside of work.

Among our benefits, Humana provides medical, dental and vision benefits, 401(k) retirement savings plan, time off (including paid time off, company and personal holidays, paid parental and caregiver leave), short‑term and long‑term disability, life insurance and many other opportunities.

Application Deadline: 09-29-2026

About us

About Humana: Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) is a leading U.S. healthcare company. Through our Humana insurance services and our CenterWell healthcare services, we make it easier for the millions of people we serve to achieve their best health – delivering the care and service they need, when they need it. These efforts are leading to a better quality of life for people with Medicare and Medicaid, families, individuals, military service personnel, and communities at large. Learn more about what we offer atHumana.comand atCenterWell.com.

Equal Opportunity Employer 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.

It is also the policy of Humana to take affirmative action, in compliance with Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act and VEVRAA, to employ and to advance in employment individuals with disability or protected veteran status, and to base all employment decisions only on valid job requirements.

This policy shall apply to all employment actions, including but not limited to recruitment, hiring, upgrading, promotion, transfer, layoff, recall, termination, rates of pay or other forms of compensation and selection for training, including apprenticeship, at all levels of employment.