Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Humana Inc. is a leading U.S. healthcare company seeking a Principal Data Engineer to design and deliver data pipelines for the NBA platform's Databricks Lakehouse. The role involves hands-on engineering, leading a small team, and ensuring the quality and reliability of data for AI models and decision systems.
Responsibilities
- Pipeline delivery - design, build, and own the Bronze/Silver/Gold lakehouse pipelines that power the NBA platform: member profiles, clinical signals, behavioral data, web clickstream, and socioeconomic features
- Hands-on development - actively write and ship production SQL, Python, and Spark code alongside your team; this is not a supervisory role
- Data modeling - own the Gold layer schema that serves as the canonical member feature set for model training and batch scoring; make design decisions that balance flexibility, performance, and governance
- Data quality - build and maintain data quality checks, null/sparsity monitoring, and pipeline alerting so the team knows before anyone else when something is wrong
- External data integration - onboard new data sources (clinical feeds, government datasets, third-party signals) from raw ingestion through production-ready features
- Contractor management - manage data engineering contractors within your pod; set expectations, review work, and hold the team to quality standards
- Cross-functional partnership - work closely with the Principal Decision Intelligence Engineer on feature requirements, and with software engineering pods on how data flows into the decisioning system
Skills
- Sponsorship is not available for this role
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or relevant field
- 10+ years of data engineering experience with at least 1-2 years in a tech lead or senior lead capacity
- Deep hands-on experience with Databricks and Delta Lake - you have built and owned production pipelines, not just contributed to them
- Strong SQL and Python skills; comfortable with Spark at scale
- Experience designing and owning a medallion lakehouse architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold or equivalent)
- Proven ability to lead a small team or pod through delivery and manage contractor resources
- Strong data quality instincts - you treat bad data as a production incident
- Clear communicator - you can explain a pipeline design decision to a data scientist, a product owner, and a compliance officer
- Comfort using AI productivity tools (Claude, Copilot, or similar) to accelerate development and analysis
- Masters degree
- Experience with Databricks Delta Live Tables, Unity Catalog, and Feature Store
- Familiarity with Kafka-based event pipelines and real-time data ingestion
- Background in healthcare, insurance, or other regulated industries with PHI/HIPAA data handling requirements
- Experience integrating government or third-party datasets (CMS, CDC, STARS, or similar)
Benefits
- 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
- This job is eligible for a bonus incentive plan. This incentive opportunity is based upon company and/or individual performance.
Company Overview