Software Engineer (Node.js, Python)

About The Company Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) is a leading health and well-being company dedicated to putting health first for its members, employees, and communities. With a commitment to delivering innovative healthcare solutions, Humana offers a wide range of insurance services and healthcare programs designed to improve quality of life and promote wellness. Through its subsidiaries, including CenterWell healthcare services, the company strives to make healthcare more accessible, personalized, and efficient. Humana's mission is to help people achieve their best health by providing compassionate care and supporting smart healthcare decisions. The organization values diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity, fostering a collaborative environment where innovation and excellence thrive. About The Role We are seeking a seasoned Lead Software Engineer to join our dynamic team. In this critical role, you will architect and deliver foundational backend services that enable real-time recommendations to be dependable, auditable, and scalable. Your primary focus will be on designing and implementing the State Machine, managing authoritative state and legal transitions, and developing the Transactional Outbox pattern to ensure exactly-once intent emission for downstream consumers. This role combines technical leadership with active engineering, requiring you to set technical standards, mentor peers, and collaborate closely with platform, data, and product teams. The ideal candidate will possess a robust understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, data modeling, and operational excellence, ensuring high performance under significant load and latency constraints. You will play a pivotal role in building resilient, traceable, and efficient systems that support mission-critical applications and compliance standards. Qualifications Minimum of 8 years experience in backend or platform service development, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead capacity overseeing mission-critical systems.

Advanced proficiency in Node.js/TypeScript, Python, and/or Java/Kotlin.

Hands-on experience with Transactional Outbox patterns, idempotent consumers, and exactly-once delivery mechanisms.

Strong expertise in relational database modeling, particularly with Postgres or MySQL, including query optimization and partitioning strategies.

Proficiency in ORM frameworks such as TypeORM, JPA, Hibernate, or jOOQ, and experience with zero-downtime migrations.

Deep understanding of transactions, isolation levels, locking, and backpressure management in high-throughput environments.

Experience designing contract-first APIs (OpenAPI), managing schema versioning, and ensuring backward compatibility.

Knowledge of distributed systems principles, event sourcing, CQRS, and CDC tools like Debezium is a plus.

Experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry and familiarity with SRE practices including error budgets and SLOs.

Ability to mentor engineering teams on data modeling, concurrency, ORM best practices, and operational excellence. Responsibilities Architect and implement the State Machine, defining execution lifecycles, business states, and strict transition guards to ensure deterministic and auditable state changes.

Design and develop the Transactional Outbox pattern, ensuring atomic persistence and publishing, managing retries, backoff logic, and dead-letter queues.

Lead data modeling efforts, creating relational schemas for transition logs, current state projections, and outbox records with scalability and correctness in mind.

Implement and optimize database transactions, isolation levels, and indexing strategies to support high-throughput operations.

Lead zero-downtime database migrations, employing tools like Liquibase or Flyway, with forward/backward-compatible strategies.

Build resilient projections, caches, and leverage CDC tools for safe reprocessing and data consistency.

Architect distributed systems that handle concurrent updates, partitions, and partial failures while maintaining correctness and performance.

Instrument systems for observability, including tracing, metrics, and structured logging; develop dashboards for monitoring key indicators.

Create replay tools and maintain immutable audit trails to support compliance and incident response.

Own operational practices, including runbooks and troubleshooting procedures, ensuring high system availability and reliability.

Collaborate with decision-service owners and cross-functional teams to ensure stateless, side-effect-free integrations.

Lead design reviews, establish development standards, and promote best practices around contract-first API development, migrations, and idempotent patterns.

Mentor engineering team members on technical topics, fostering a culture of rigorous testing, code review, and continuous improvement.

Utilize AI tools to accelerate development processes while ensuring core business logic remains human-authored and thoroughly reviewed. Benefits Competitive medical, dental, and vision insurance plans to support your health and well-being.

401(k) retirement savings plan with company matching contributions.

Paid time off, including holidays, volunteer days, and paid parental and caregiver leave.

Short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, and other wellness benefits.

Opportunities for professional growth, training, and development within a collaborative environment.

Flexible work arrangements with a hybrid model (approximately 3 days in-office, depending on location).

Supportive and inclusive workplace culture that values diversity and equal opportunity. Equal Opportunity Humana is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. We do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, marital status, genetic information, disability, or protected veteran status