Senior Backend Engineer: State Machines & Exactly-Once Ops

Humana; Tennessee; Hybrid; USD 107,000 - 147,000; Full time

Job summary

Humana is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, implement, and operate mission-critical stateful services for real-time decisioning and personalization. The role focuses on state machines, transactional state stores, idempotent APIs, and outbox patterns, with emphasis on reliability, observability, and auditability in distributed systems.

Ideal candidates have 6+ years in backend or platform engineering, proficiency in Java/Kotlin/Go/Python, and experience with AI-assisted development

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• Design and implement state machines governing lifecycle transitions.
• Architect transactional state stores and ensure correctness under failures.
• Develop outbox-pattern based reliability for state updates and events.
• Handle concurrency and distributed system challenges with idempotency.
• Collaborate with platform, data, and QA teams; mentor engineers.
• Improve observability with structured logging, metrics, and tracing.

Skills

State machine modeling

Exactly-once processing

Idempotent APIs

Transactional state stores

Java/Kotlin/Go/Python

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

Job description

Humana is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, implement, and operate mission-critical stateful services for real-time decisioning and personalization. The role focuses on state machines, transactional state stores, idempotent APIs, and outbox patterns, with emphasis on reliability, observability, and auditability in distributed systems.

Ideal candidates have 6+ years in backend or platform engineering, proficiency in Java/Kotlin/Go/Python, and experience with AI-assisted development