Principal Engineer

HealthEdge is modernizing the technology that powers health plans across the United States. As a Principal Engineer, you will be at the center of that mission – leading the architecture and delivery of complex enterprise solutions, serving as a trusted technical advisor to our most strategic customers, and shaping the long-term direction of our platform. This is a hands-on leadership role for an engineer who thrives at the intersection of deep technical craft, customer impact, and organizational influence. 

In this role, you will work primarily with HealthRules® Payer, HealthEdge’s core claims administration and payment accuracy platform built for modern health plans. HealthRules Payer powers some of the most complex payer operations in the country – handling claims processing, benefit configuration, provider management and payment integrity at enterprise scale. You will work closely with customer technical teams to support implementations, resolve production issues and help health plans get the most out of the platform as their business evolves. 

What you will do:

Technical Leadership & Architecture 

• Lead the architecture, design and implementation of complex product features and enterprise solutions across distributed, highly integrated environments. 

• Design and evolve microservices and enterprise application architectures with a focus on scalability, reliability, performance, security and operational excellence. 

• Evaluate and recommend technologies, frameworks, cloud services and architectural patterns to meet current and future product needs. 

• Contribute to the long-term technical direction of the product suite, balancing customer requirements, product strategy, technical debt and emerging technologies. 

Delivery & Engineering Excellence 

• Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end – from requirements discovery and solution design through development, testing, deployment and production support. 

• Break down business and technical requirements into scalable, maintainable solutions; establish approaches, estimate work and provide technical direction across the full SDLC. 

• Drive adoption of modern engineering practices including TDD, automated testing, CI/CD, DevOps, code reviews and production-readiness standards. 

• Guide the design and operation of cloud-native applications, including architecture, scalability, resiliency, security, observability and cost-conscious infrastructure decisions. 

Customer Engagement & Problem Solving 

• Serve as a senior technical advisor to strategic enterprise customers – working directly with their technical teams to validate solutions, resolve complex challenges and guide implementations. 

• Lead the investigation and resolution of complex production issues across application, database, integration, networking and cloud layers. Run point on critical issues and coordinate escalation as needed. 

• Work with customer teams to assess production infrastructure, capacity and performance, and recommend architecture changes to support future growth. 

• Analyze production data, recurring issues and operational trends to generate recommendations for product improvements and roadmap priorities. 

Mentorship & Collaboration 

• Mentor engineers through architectural guidance, design and code reviews, technical coaching and hands-on problem solving. 

• Act as a technical liaison between strategic customers and internal engineering, product and leadership teams during critical implementations and production issues. 

• Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product Management, QA, DevOps/SRE and Infrastructure in an Agile environment. 

• Promote a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, accountability and knowledge sharing. 

What you bring:

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of leading complex enterprise software initiatives. 

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a closely related field, or equivalent professional experience. 

• Expert-level Java and object-oriented programming skills with extensive experience building enterprise-scale applications, services and APIs. 

• Deep understanding of enterprise application architecture – distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, APIs, messaging and complex production environments. 

• Strong knowledge of microservices architecture, including service decomposition, API design, inter-service communication, resiliency, scalability and observability. 

• Strong cloud computing and cloud-native architecture knowledge, including: 

• Compute, storage, networking and managed cloud services 

• Scalability, high availability, fault tolerance and disaster recovery 

• Cloud security, identity/access management and secure application design 

• Containers, container orchestration and Infrastructure as Code 

• Monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing and observability 

• CI/CD, automated deployment and capacity planning 

• Strong database expertise: relational databases, SQL, data modeling, query optimization and performance tuning; familiarity with NoSQL data stores. 

• Experience with RESTful APIs, SOAP/XML web services, messaging systems, event-driven architectures and asynchronous processing. 

• Strong knowledge of Linux/Unix environments and scripting, application servers, networking fundamentals and infrastructure components. 

• Experience with application performance monitoring tools such as AppDynamics – monitoring, alerting, performance analysis and production troubleshooting. 

• Familiarity with modern web frameworks such as React. 

• Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical projects, establish technical direction and drive execution through production. 

• Ability to independently manage multiple high-priority issues, apply structured diagnostic techniques and coordinate resolution across teams. 

• Proven ability to mentor engineers and provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, design discussions and knowledge sharing.

Bonus Points:

• Experience working in the healthcare domain – strongly preferred. 

• Familiarity with HIPAA and the ability to handle Protected Health Information (PHI) with the highest standards of confidentiality and integrity. 

• Experience with WebLogic application server. 

• Experience with IntelliJ, JUnit or JUnitPerf. 

• Commitment to software quality, security, reliability and operational excellence. 

Geographic Responsibility:  Remote, US

Type of Employment: Full-time, permanent 

FLSA Classification (USA Only): Exempt 

Work Environment: The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job:  

• The employee is occasionally required to move around the office. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus.  

• Work across multiple time zones in a hybrid or remote work environment. 

• Long periods of time sitting and/or standing in front of a computer using video technology. 

• May require travel dependent on company needs. 

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of the job being performed by the individual(s) assigned to this position. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, and skills required. HealthEdge reserves the right to modify, add, or remove duties and to assign other duties as necessary. In addition, reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of this position in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.  Candidates may be required to go through a pre-employment criminal background check. 

HealthEdge is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to workforce diversity and actively encourage all qualified persons to seek employment with us, including, but not limited to, racial and ethnic minorities, women, veterans and persons with disabilities. 

#LI-Remote 

**The annual US base salary range for this position is $206,000 to $224,000. This salary range may cover multiple career levels at HealthEdge. Final compensation will be determined during the interview process and is based on a combination of factors including, but not limited to, your skills, experience, qualifications and education.