Lead Software Engineer - NBA

Description

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• The Lead Full Stack Engineer owns the NBA platform's orchestration and state machine — the system that carries a decision from the moment it is made to the moment it is activated, delivered, and acknowledged across member engagement channels. Built in Node.js/TypeScript on the Temporal workflow platform, the solution manages durable workflow execution, long-running member journeys, and reliable action delivery through Transactional Outbox and Kafka-based event patterns. This role owns the critical path between decision generation, activation, delivery, and receipt processing, ensuring actions are executed correctly, consistently, and at enterprise scale. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you write code, lead a small team of engineers and contractors, and are accountable end-to-end for the durability, correctness, observability, and timeliness of action delivery across the member journey.

Key Responsibilities

• Pod delivery — Own end-to-end delivery for the orchestration pod: planning, execution, quality, and shipping on time.

• Workflow orchestration — Design and build durable, long-running workflows on Temporal in Node.js/TypeScript that model the member action lifecycle, state transitions, scheduling, activation, and delivery outcomes.

• Action delivery architecture — Own the end-to-end action delivery pipeline from decision publication through activation, delivery acknowledgment, and state reconciliation. Design and implement Transactional Outbox patterns, atomic persist-and-publish workflows, idempotency controls, retry/backoff mechanisms, dead-letter queue handling, and delivery receipt processing.

• Activation integrations — Own the components that activate decisions to Adobe

Experience

• Platform (AEP) and publish through Kafka output patterns to downstream channels. Define delivery contracts, activation guarantees, and receipt ingestion patterns that ensure reliable action execution.

• Hands-on development — Contribute code alongside the team, including Temporal workflows and activities, Node.js services, Kafka producers and consumers, outbox processors, and integration services.

• Technical decisions — Make the day-to-day architecture decisions for the pod, including workflow design, state machine modeling, retry and compensation strategies, idempotency, topic strategy, schema evolution, delivery guarantees, and API contracts.

• Distributed systems reliability — Engineer for correctness in a highly asynchronous environment. Ensure exactly-once business intent through idempotent consumers, deduplication strategies, durable state management, safe retries, and graceful failure handling.

• Observability and operations — Establish monitoring, tracing, alerting, and operational visibility across workflow execution, event publication, activation processing, and delivery acknowledgment pipelines.

• Team leadership — Manage and mentor engineers and contractors; run code reviews, uphold engineering standards, and keep the team unblocked and moving.

• Cross-team coordination — Coordinate interfaces with decisioning, the Action Library, activation systems, and the platform team; surface dependencies, integration risks, and operational concerns early.

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• Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or relevant area

• 6+ years of full stack software engineering experience, with at least 1–2 years in a tech-lead or senior-lead capacity.

• Strong Node.js/TypeScript backend experience building production services.

• Hands-on experience with workflow orchestration platforms, with Temporal strongly preferred (or comparable technologies such as Cadence, Step Functions, or Airflow for durable workflows).

• Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.

• Experience designing and implementing Kafka producer and consumer patterns in production environments.

• Experience building reliable event delivery systems using Transactional Outbox, event-driven integration patterns, or comparable messaging architectures.

• Demonstrated ability to lead a small pod through delivery and be accountable for technical outcomes.

• Experience operating cloud-native systems on Azure or equivalent cloud infrastructure using Kubernetes, containers, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Clear communicator who can represent the pod's architecture, delivery status, operational risks, and tradeoffs to technical and business stakeholders.

• Preferred Qualifications

• Production experience with Temporal at scale, including workflow versioning, long-running workflow management, and operational lifecycle management.

• Deep experience implementing Transactional Outbox patterns, delivery acknowledgment workflows, dead-letter queue management, receipt reconciliation, and exactly-once processing semantics.

• Experience integrating Adobe

Experience

• Platform (AEP) or comparable activation and engagement platforms.

• Experience with Kafka ecosystem tooling, event schema governance, and large-scale event-driven architectures.

• Familiarity with the wider NBA platform stack, including React/TypeScript, Java services, and Decision Intelligence systems.

• Experience with Helm, Terraform, and Kubernetes-based deployment patterns.

• Background in healthcare, insurance, or another regulated industry with PHI handling, auditability, and compliance requirements.

• Work Style: Remote/Hybrid - Preferably Boston, MA.

• Occasional travel to Humana's offices for training or meetings may be required.

• Work Hours: Typical business hours are Monday-Friday, 8 hours/day, 5 days/week-- some flexibility might be possible, depending on business needs.