Lead Software Engineer - Decision Integrity & Observability

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We are developing an enterprise-scale Next Best Action (NBA) platform that delivers real-time, compliant, and explainable decisions across both digital and assisted channels. As we expand, our focus extends beyond speed to encompass decision integrity: ensuring deterministic outcomes, verifiable explainability, and audit-ready replay.
The Lead Engineer - Decision Integrity & Observability is responsible for the core runtime infrastructure that guarantees every decision is traceable, explainable, and defensible. This role will embed integrity and observability throughout the decision kernel, rules arbitration, Action Library integration, and state/outbox execution boundaries, empowering teams to innovate with confidence. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with organization-wide impact.

Key Responsibilities

Decision Integrity (NBA Core)

• Define and enforce determinism guarantees for the decision kernel (Context Rules Scores Reconciliation Response).
• Govern the use of artifacts such as rule packs, reason-code taxonomies, model versions, and objective configurations to ensure decisions are fully explained (including plain-English reasons, rule/policy references, and model stamps).
• Enforce contact policy controls (consent, quiet hours, frequency caps) and event-driven suppressions, ensuring all surfaced channels are compliant with policy.

Runtime Observability & Forensics

• Design end-to-end traceability, establishing lineage, causality, and cross-service correlation across the Decision Engine, Rules, Action Library, State Machine, Outbox, and channel executors.
• Develop append-only decision ledgers (input summaries, context hashes, rule/model versions, explanations) with hash-verified replay paths for auditability.
• Implement semantic guards to detect and alert on business logic errors (e.g., unauthorized channel offers), extending beyond traditional infrastructure monitoring.
• Integrate OpenTelemetry instrumentation; provide operational dashboards displaying key indicators (p50/p95 latencies, rule-denial distributions, model latency, cache hit rates, replay health).

Release Safety & Validation

• Develop determinism validation harnesses using golden datasets to ensure consistent outputs for identical inputs and versions (integrated into CI/CD pipelines).
• Ensure contract compliance for NBA interfaces via OpenAPI, schema validation, and consumer-driven contracts across all platform modules.
• Apply property-based validation to rigorously test rules, scoring, and reconciliation under various policy and event scenarios.
• Automate performance and resilience checks, including timeouts, circuit breakers, fallback logic, and chaos testing to maintain p95 SLOs.
• Maintain explainability regression controls, ensuring that changes to rules or models do not degrade the quality of explanations.

Cross-Team Enablement

• Collaborate with rules and policy teams on reason-code coverage and pre-release simulation/backtesting.
• Work with machine learning teams on model versioning, feature parity (training vs. serving), latency objectives, and safe rollout strategies (shadow/canary deployments).
• Coordinate with state management and outbox teams to ensure exactly-once intent, idempotent consumers, legal state transitions, and invariant validation.
• Support orchestration and integration needs for Node.js/TypeScript surfaces as required.

Use your skills to make an impact

Required Qualifications

• Minimum of 8 years in backend/platform service development; at least 3 years in a senior or lead role overseeing mission-critical systems.
• Proven experience delivering backend/platform systems with a focus on correctness, reliability, and traceability.
• Demonstrated ability to reason about stateful, distributed flows and identify failure modes across interconnected services.
• Hands-on implementation of advanced observability (structured logging, tracing)

Technical Expectations

• Core Platform & Runtime (Java):
  Advanced Java backend development, with a focus on deterministic execution and explicit invariants. Familiarity with rules/policy engines or DSLs; JVM-compiled DSL experience is advantageous.
• Distributed Systems & Messaging:
  Experience in event-driven, asynchronous architectures, preferably with Kafka or similar pub/sub systems. Mastery of delivery guarantees (at-least-once transport, idempotent consumers, exactly-once effects via the Outbox pattern).
• Persistence & Data Modeling:
  Expertise in relational database design (PostgreSQL or equivalent) supporting immutability, auditability, and replay, including append-only histories and versioned records. In-depth knowledge of transactions, isolation levels, and failure boundaries, with the ability to utilize explicit SQL for performance and correctness.
• Observability & Diagnostics:
  Proficiency with OpenTelemetry and the ability to correlate logs, traces, and metrics across synchronous and asynchronous flows. Capability to design observability systems that provide business-contextual explanations.
• Ecosystem Awareness:
  Experience working alongside Node.js/TypeScript services for orchestration/API composition. Exposure to production ML inference, including deterministic ranking integration and robust fallback handling.
• Engineering-Centric Validation:
  Ownership of determinism/replay test harnesses, contract validation, property-based tests, and performance/chaos gates in CI/CD. Application of trace-driven assertions to ensure decision integrity is observable.

Additional Information

SSN Alert Statement

Humana values personal identity protection. Please be aware that applicants may be asked to provide their Social Security Number, if it is not already on file. When required, an email will be sent from with instructions on how to add the information into your official application on Humana's secure website.

WAH Internet Statement

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.
Satellite, cellular and microwave connection can be used only if approved by leadership.
Employees who live and work from Home in the state of California, Illinois, Montana, or South Dakota will be provided a bi-weekly payment for their internet expense.
Humana will provide Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees with telephone equipment appropriate to meet the business requirements for their position/job.
Work from a dedicated space lacking ongoing interruptions to protect member PHI / HIPAA information

Why This Role Matters:

This role ensures the platform does not simply make decisions, but makes decisions that are trustworthy, explainable, and defensible. It is foundational to platform maturity and empowers teams to move rapidly while maintaining confidence and accountability.

If you are passionate about building systems where correctness is engineered, behavior is observable, and accountability is intrinsic, this is an exceptional opportunity to shape decision-making at scale.

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, experience, 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, volunteer time off, paid parental and caregiver leave), short-term and long-term disability, life insurance and many other opportunities.

Application Deadline: 03-19-2026
About us
Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) is committed to putting health first - for our teammates, our customers and our company. Through our Humana insurance services and 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, Medicaid, families, individuals, military service personnel, and communities at large.

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, demotion, layoff, recall, termination, rates of pay or other forms of compensation and selection for training, including apprenticeship, at all levels of employment.