Principal Software Engineer

Highmark Health • Carolina, PA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

We are seeking a visionary Principal Software Engineer responsible for building scalable public-facing software applications across Digital Member Experience channels. As a key player within a mobile application agile engineering team you will design and deliver scalable, enterprise-grade digital applications. In this role, you will take an end-to-end architectural view of our platforms—spanning from client experiences and API gateways to backend services, data stores, and event pipelines. You will own the complete software development lifecycle, collaborating closely with stakeholders from ideation and business analysis to technical execution. A critical focus of this role is ensuring the secure handling of Protected Health Information (PHI), establishing robust protocols for authorization, consent gating, encryption, audit logging, and compliance. As a technical expert, you will define service topologies, drive complex vendor migrations, lead partner integrations, and set measurable non-functional requirements. Furthermore, you will bridge the gap between technical execution and business strategy by authoring Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and presenting strategic solutions to senior leadership, architecture reviews, and security teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or closely related field
• 9 years of proficiency in design and analysis of algorithms, data structures, and design patterns in the building and deploying of scalable; highly available systems
• 9 years with at least two modern programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, ACE, IIB/ITX, Informatica preferred), and experience with at least three of the following: React, Angular v4+, NodeJS, NoSQL databases, HTML5, CSS, Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services.
• 9 years in understanding of web services technologies such as REST, HTTPS, JSON
• 9 years with two or more general purpose programming languages including but not limited to: Java, Python (Django/Flask), C/C++, C#, Objective C, JavaScript, or Go
• 9 years of defining system architectures and exploring technical feasibility trade-offs for optimizing short term execution while planning for long term technical capabilities
• 9 years producing code that is fault-tolerant, efficient, and maintainable
• Demonstrated ability to achieve stretch goals in a highly innovative and fast paced environment
• Have experience working with agile methodology of scrum
• Interest and ability to learn other programming languages as needed
• Knowledge of professional software engineering practices & best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, unit testing, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
• Knowledge of professional software engineering practices & best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, unit testing, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
• Strong track record in designing and implementing large scale consumer facing applications
• Ability to think in terms of system boundaries and contracts, and to state clearly which component owns which responsibility and why.
• Ability to make and document architecture decisions under incomplete information, including trade-offs considered and alternatives rejected, and to revisit a decision when its premises change.
• Comfort operating in a hybrid technical estate where some systems are modern cloud-native services and others are long-lived enterprise platforms that cannot be replaced on your schedule.
• Security and privacy as a default engineering instinct: least privilege, defense in depth, data minimization, and the habit of asking where sensitive data ends up in logs, caches, analytics, and model context.
• Strong written communication.
• Ability to influence technical direction across team boundaries without direct authority, including with enterprise architecture, security, platform, and vendor partners.
• Effective use of AI-assisted development tooling, with sound judgment about where generated code requires human intervention.

Nice To Haves

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field
• 9 years working with a variety of technology systems, designing solutions or developing applications in healthcare
• 9 years of translating design mockups, prototypes and user stories into working applications
• 3 years of working with Natural Language Understanding, Deep Neural Networks and related fields
• Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, Professional Cloud Developer, or Professional Cloud Security Engineer.

Responsibilities

• Lead the resolution of a variety of technical and business problems ensuring proper scalability, performance, maintainability, security, and robustness
• Responsible for idea generation, exploring and implementing appropriate technical solutions to achieve the required product features, as well as monitoring technical process against project plan while safeguarding functionality, scalability and performance.
• Explore new technologies and architectural concepts in order to ensure our products are using cutting-edge solutions.
• Participate in high-level development estimations to help ensure roadmap execution is on target.
• Present solutions and ideas to team members and management to drive technical solutions and implementations.
• Mentor and provide leadership to other software engineers as needed
• Own architecture for one or more platform domains end to end, from the client experience through the API gateway, backend service, data store, and event pipeline.
• Designing and evolving the service topologies.
• Define how Protected Health Information moves through the system, including authorization and consent gating, minimum necessary data shaping, redaction and classification, audit logging, and encryption and key management.
• Set and defend non-functional requirements as measurable engineering targets and drive services that miss them back into compliance.
• Lead integration design against partner and vendor systems, including identity federation, file and API exchange patterns, webhook ingestion.
• Design migration paths off incumbent vendor platforms: parallel operation, traffic cutover, rollback plans, and data reconciliation.
• Write and maintain architecture decision records, service specifications, and interface contracts, and present them to engineering teams, architecture review, security, and senior leadership.

Benefits

• Base pay is determined by a variety of factors including a candidate’s qualifications, experience, and expected contributions, as well as internal peer equity, market, and business considerations. The displayed salary range does not reflect any geographic differential Highmark may apply for certain locations based upon comparative markets.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal