Lead Software Engineer - Decision Integrity & ...

Lead Software Engineer - Decision Integrity & Observability at Humana in Boise, Idaho, United States Job Description Become a part of our caring community and help us put health first 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 To view full details and how to apply, please login or create a Job Seeker account

Created: 2026-01-30