Staff Software Engineer, Caching

Judi Health; Denver (CO); Hybrid; USD 184,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Judi Health is building the technology infrastructure our nation needs to deliver the healthcare we deserve — a domain where correctness is non‑negotiable and latency has real‑world consequences. The Staff Engineer in Architecture is responsible for the caching strategy across claims, eligibility, and prior authorizations, influencing data access patterns and consistency contracts.

You will own the design and lifecycle of the caching layer, drive best practices, mentor engineers, and work across

Qualifications

• 10+ years of production engineering experience in distributed systems and caching.
• Experience operating Redis, Memcached, ElastiCache at cloud scale with topology and eviction policies.
• Deep understanding of multi-tenancy and shared caching infrastructure.
• Knowledge of cache consistency and invalidation strategies for different workloads.
• Experience with cache replacement algorithms beyond LRU (LFU/ARC) and multi-tier architectures.
• Experience in cloud-native environments emphasizing redundancy and resiliency.
• Track record leading cross-team technical initiatives and creating durable documentation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate caching infrastructure serving as the data access layer for a complex domain model.
• Own the full lifecycle of cache design — eviction, topology, invalidation, and recovery.
• Define performance and correctness contracts between caching layer and dependent services.
• Drive adoption of caching best practices across engineering and shared libraries.
• Diagnose and resolve correctness, performance, and stability issues; lead incident response.
• Mentor senior engineers and participate in design and code reviews.
• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation to provide continuous operational support.

Skills

Distributed systems

Caching infrastructure

Cloud-scale operations

Architectural guidance

Cross-team collaboration

Strong written communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS

Tools

Redis

Memcached

ElastiCache

Go

Rust

C/C++

Job description

Judi Health is an enterprise health technology company providing a comprehensive suite of solutions for employers and health plans, including:

• Judi Rx, a public benefit corporation delivering full-service pharmacy benefit management (PBM) solutions to self-insured employers,
• Judi Health™, which offers full-service health benefit management solutions to employers, TPAs, and health plans, and
• Judi®, the industry’s leading proprietary Enterprise Health Platform (EHP), which consolidates all claim administration-related workflows in one scalable, secure platform.

Together with our clients, we’re rebuilding trust in healthcare in the U.S. and deploying the infrastructure we need for the care we deserve. To learn more, visit www.judi.health.

Hybrid 3 days (offices in NYC, Denver, CO and Charlotte, NC area)

Position Summary

Judi Health is building the technology infrastructure our nation needs to deliver the healthcare we deserve — a domain where correctness is non‑negotiable and latency has real‑world consequences. The Architecture organization is responsible for the technical foundation the rest of the company builds on: the standards, patterns, and infrastructure primitives that engineering teams depend on to move fast and build correctly. The Caching team sits within Architecture's Core Platform function, owning the data access layer across the entire platform.

As a Staff Engineer in Architecture, your influence extends beyond what you ship directly. The standards you set, the patterns you establish, and the decisions you document become the reference point for how caching is approached across the organization. You are building for the platform and for the teams that build on it.

The platform's domain model is deeply interdependent — claims, eligibility, accumulations, and prior authorizations are coupled across multiple high-throughput workflows, and a cache that reflects an inconsistent view of that model has consequences that compound quickly. You will be directly responsible for designing invalidation architectures and consistency contracts for a domain where the tolerance for stale data varies by workflow and the cost of a wrong read is high.

One of your first major initiatives will be architecting the caching strategy for our most critical processing domain: claims adjudication. This is a deeply embedded engagement. You will work directly within the domain — reviewing and analyzing real claims data and processing workflows — to understand the caching requirements at their root. This data flows across systems throughout the platform, directly influencing critical workflows including prior authorization, reporting, and member experience.

Position Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the caching infrastructure that serves as the data access layer for one of the most complex domain models in American healthcare
• Own the full lifecycle of cache design — from eviction policy and topology decisions to invalidation architecture and operational recovery
• Define and own the performance and correctness contracts between the caching layer and the services that depend on it
• Drive adoption of caching best practices across engineering — eliminating anti-patterns, building shared libraries, and making cache‑aware design the default
• Diagnose and resolve correctness, performance, and stability issues in the caching layer, including leading incident response and post‑incident reviews
• Set the technical bar for the caching team through design review, code review, and direct mentorship of senior engineers
• Participate in a 24/7 on‑call rotation to provide continuous operational support and rapid incident response

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of production engineering experience, with deep specialization in distributed systems and caching infrastructure
• Production experience operating distributed caching systems — Redis, Valkey, Memcached, or ElastiCache — at cloud scale, including cluster topology, eviction policy, replication, and failure recovery
• Deep understanding of multi‑tenancy and the operational complexity of running shared caching infrastructure across many independent workloads
• Deep understanding of cache consistency and the failure modes that emerge at scale — thundering herd, hot key saturation, cache penetration, and dual‑write consistency problems — and the judgment to choose the right invalidation strategy for a given workload
• Fluency with cache replacement algorithms beyond LRU — LFU, ARC, and probabilistic eviction — and the tradeoffs of multi‑tier architectures when an in‑process layer belongs alongside a shared distributed cache
• Experience in cloud‑native environments where redundancy, resource efficiency, and resiliency are first‑class requirements, not afterthoughts
• A track record of leading cross‑team technical initiatives — driving decisions through influence and producing documentation that holds up over time
• Strong written and verbal communication — you produce architectural guidance that the broader engineering organization depends on
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity — at this level, you will be handed problems, not plans, and are expected to identify the right approach and drive it from first principles to production
• Strong experience supporting 24/7 production on‑call rotations, including responding to alerts and resolving incidents outside of standard business hours

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in healthcare, pharmacy benefits, or other regulated industries
• Working familiarity with probabilistic data structures and when they belong in a caching architecture over standard key‑value patterns
• Experience with caching in real‑time transactional processing domains — payments, financial services, insurance, or healthcare — where data correctness and timeliness have measurable downstream consequences
• Familiarity with database replication and change data capture as mechanisms for cache invalidation and maintaining consistency with the source of truth
• Systems‑level programming experience in Rust, Go, or C/C++, particularly for performance‑critical infrastructure components
• Experience on AWS with managed caching, database, and streaming services
• Open‑source contributions, technical publications, or conference presentations in distributed systems or infrastructure

Nothing in this position description restricts management’s right to assign or reassign duties and responsibilities to this job at any time.

New York, NY Salary Range

$200,800 – $251,000 USD

Denver, CO Salary Range

$184,000 – $230,000 USD

Charlotte, NC Salary Range

$167,200 – $209,000 USD

All employees are responsible for adherence to the Judi Health Code of Conduct including the reporting of non‑compliance. This position description is designed to be flexible, allowing management the opportunity to assign or reassign duties and responsibilities as needed to best meet organizational goals.

We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, medical condition, genetic information, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

By submitting an application, you agree to the retention of your personal data for consideration for a future position at Judi Health. More details about Judi Health’s privacy practices can be found at https://www.judi.health/legal/privacy-policy.