Senior Kafka Developer - NBA

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The Senior Kafka Developer builds and operates the event streaming that connects Team Caliber — the NBA platform's business rules engine, built in Java and Drools — to the rest of the decisioning system. You design and own the Kafka topics, producers, and consumers that move eligibility, suppression, and decisioning events through the platform reliably and in order.

This is a hands-on backend role for an engineer who is fluent in event-driven design and enjoys making high-throughput, fault-tolerant streaming systems work correctly under real production load.

Key Responsibilities

• Event streaming — Design, build, and own Kafka producers, consumers, and topic strategy that carry rules-engine inputs and outputs across the platform.
• Rules engine integration — Integrate the Java/Drools rules engine with upstream and downstream systems through well-designed event and API contracts.
• Reliability — Engineer for correctness under load: partitioning, ordering, idempotency, exactly-once or effectively-once semantics, retries, and dead-letter handling.
• Backend services — Build and maintain the Java services around the rules engine that produce and consume events and expose APIs.
• Performance and scale — Profile and tune streaming throughput and latency; ensure the pipeline scales as event volume grows.
• Observability — Instrument streams and services with logging, metrics, and alerting so issues are caught early and diagnosed quickly.
• Quality — Write tests, participate in code reviews, and uphold engineering standards; the platform handles member PHI, so security and compliance hygiene are essential.
• Use your skills to make an impact
• Required Qualifications
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related degree
• 5+ years of backend software engineering, with hands-on production experience building on Apache Kafka/Confluent.
• Strong Java skills and experience designing event-driven services.
• Deep understanding of Kafka internals: partitioning, consumer groups, offsets, ordering, and delivery semantics.
• Solid grasp of distributed-systems fundamentals — idempotency, retries, backpressure, and failure handling in asynchronous systems.
• Experience operating services on cloud infrastructure (Azure or equivalent) with containers/Kubernetes and CI/CD.
• Clear communicator who can define and defend an event contract with partner teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with the Drools rules engine or another business rules management system.
• Familiarity with Kafka Streams, schema registry, and Avro/Protobuf.
• Experience with stream processing patterns and real-time data pipelines.
• Background in healthcare, insurance, or another regulated industry with PHI handling 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.
• Very minimal travel might be required for training, meetings, and/or conferences
• 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.

$106,900 - $147,000 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.