Senior Backend Engineer: State Machines & Distributed Systems

Humana; Rockford (TN); Hybrid; USD 107,000 - 147,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental and Vision Benefits

401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

Paid time off, holidays, and parental/

Job summary

Humana is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and operate stateful services powering real-time decisioning and personalization platforms. You will build explicit state machines, transactional state stores, and idempotent APIs for high-concurrency, low-latency environments.

Responsibilities include implementing outbox patterns, ensuring exactly-once semantics, and enabling AI-assisted development, testing, and incident analysis.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field.
• 6+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering.
• Hands-on expertise with state machine modeling and lifecycle management.
• Experience with transactional state stores and idempotent API workflows.
• Understanding of exactly-once or effectively-once processing and distributed failure modes.
• Proficiency in Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate state machines for lifecycle transitions and validation.
• Architect transactional state stores as the single source of truth with safe concurrent access.
• Implement idempotency controls to ensure at-most-once execution and safe retries.
• Develop and maintain outbox patterns to ensure atomic state updates and event delivery.
• Design for correctness under concurrency, partitions, and partial failures.
• Leverage AI-assisted tooling to generate tests, aid reviews, and speed debugging.
• Ensure observability with structured logging, metrics, and tracing.
• Collaborate with platform and data teams to improve reliability.

Skills

State machine modeling

Lifecycle management

Idempotent API design

Exactly-once processing

Distributed systems

AI-assisted tooling

Java

Kotlin

Go

Python

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

Tools

AI-assisted development tools

Job description

Humana is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and operate stateful services powering real-time decisioning and personalization platforms. You will build explicit state machines, transactional state stores, and idempotent APIs for high-concurrency, low-latency environments.

Responsibilities include implementing outbox patterns, ensuring exactly-once semantics, and enabling AI-assisted development, testing, and incident analysis.