Principal Decision Intelligence Engineer

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 The Principal Decision Intelligence Engineer is the technical lead for the NBA platform's decision intelligence capabilities. This is a principal-level full stack engineering role with end-to-end ownership of the decision system: from member feature signals through optimization and decisioning logic through production deployment. You set technical direction, guide software development teams, mentor engineers, and operate with full autonomy on complex architectural problems.

What You'll Own:

End-to-end decision system delivery
Own the complete pipeline from member signals to live decisions: feature engineering, decisioning logic, optimization, scoring, deployment into NBA platform software/infrastructure, and production monitoring.

Decision intelligence architecture
Design the system that determines what to do for each member, when, and through which channel. Translate business objectives into reward structures, constraints, and optimization formulations, and know when a rule, a model, or a solver is the right tool.

Feature and data layer
Design and build the member feature layer on the Databricks Lakehouse (clinical, behavioral, web clickstream, socioeconomic signals) in partnership with data engineering. Define what signals matter and ensure they are available, correct, and timely at decision time.

Planning and optimization
Lead the design of how the system plans sequences of actions across a member journey, balancing short-term engagement with long-term outcome goals. This includes reward shaping, constraint satisfaction, policy evaluation, and reasoning about delayed feedback.

Deployment and production systems
Own how decision outputs flow into live systems: scoring pipelines, serving infrastructure, action masking, and real-time feedback loops from downstream behavioral signals.

Experimentation and measurement
Design holdout frameworks and online evaluation strategies that isolate the effect of decisioning changes. Define success metrics and translate experiment results into system improvements and roadmap input.

Technical team leadership
Lead a team of engineers across the full delivery lifecycle. Run design reviews, set the technical quality bar, and keep delivery moving while holding the architecture together. Guide software development teams building the services, APIs, and infrastructure that support decision intelligence algorithms in production.

Mentorship
Develop team members through code reviews, pairing, and ongoing technical guidance.

AI-assisted development
Champion the use of AI coding and research tools (Claude, Copilot, etc.) across the team and model what high-leverage AI-augmented engineering looks like in practice.

What You'll Need

• Hybrid - Boston, MA with travel to Humana's onsite Hub

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or relevant field

• 10+ years in software engineering with deep exposure to data-intensive applications, applied AI, or decision systems, with a track record of end-to-end software delivery

• 2-5 years of product people leadership

• Experience leading a multifunctional technical team, setting direction, removing blockers, and being accountable for results

• Strong foundation in optimization and sequential decision-making, including objective functions, constraints, tradeoffs across time, and how system design choices affect what gets selected or learned

• Experience designing reward structures, evaluation criteria, or planning frameworks that translate a business goal into something a system can optimize against

• Hands-on experience with Python and the full engineering stack, including backend services, data pipelines, and AI/ML tooling (PyTorch, MLflow, PySpark, or equivalents)

• Experience building and owning pipelines on a cloud data platform (Databricks, Snowflake, or equivalent) at scale

• Strong grounding in experimental design, including constructing clean tests, avoiding confounding, and interpreting results correctly

• Able to make independent architectural decisions on complex, ambiguous problems

• Must be passionate about contributing to an organization focused on continuously improving consumer experiences

• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences

• Fluency with AI productivity tools (Claude, GitHub Copilot, or similar)

Strong Plus:

• Master's degree

• Experience with linear programming, integer programming, or constraint-based optimization in a production setting

• Background in personalization, recommendation systems, or next-best-action platforms

• Familiarity with Kafka-based event pipelines and real-time feedback loop design

• Experience with causal inference or uplift modeling

• Background in healthcare, insurance, or other regulated industries with PHI/HIPAA constraints

Use your skills to make an impact
 

Work Style: Hybrid - Boston, MA with 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.

Very minimal travel might be required for training, meetings, and/or conferences

Work at Home Requirements

WAH requirements: Must have the ability to provide a high-speed DSL or cable modem for a home office. Associates or contractors who live and work from home in the state of California will be provided with payment for their internet expense.

A minimum standard speed for optimal performance of 25x10 (25mpbs download x 10mpbs upload) is required.  

Satellite and Wireless Internet service is NOT allowed for this role.

A dedicated space lacking ongoing interruptions to protect member PHI / HIPAA information

Interview Format 

As part of our hiring process, we will be using on-demand technology provided by Hire Vue, a third-party vendor. This technology provides our team of recruiters and hiring managers with an enhanced method for decision-making through on-demand candidate assessments.

If you are selected to move forward from your application prescreen, you will receive correspondence inviting you to participate in an on-demand assessment with pre-determined questions. You should anticipate the assessment to take approximately 10-15 minutes.

Your on-demand assessment will be reviewed, and you will subsequently be informed if you will be moving forward to next round of interviews.

SSN Task via Workday

Should you be extended a formal employment offer you will receive a request to enter your SSN into our Workday system to scan for duplicate profiles.

Work at Home Requirements: 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. In certain roles, the minimum recommended internet speed required by Humana may not be sufficient for business needs. Humana reserves the right to require associates to upgrade their internet service if necessary. Work from a dedicated space lacking ongoing interruptions to protect member PHI / HIPAA information.
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.

 

$187,900 - $258,500 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, paid parental and caregiver leave), short-term and long-term disability, life insurance and many other opportunities.

About Us
 About Humana: Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) is a leading U.S. healthcare company. Through our Humana insurance services and our 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 and Medicaid, families, individuals, military service personnel, and communities at large. Learn more about what we offer at Humana.com and at CenterWell.com.

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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.