Staff Software Engineer, Caching

Hybrid 3 days (offices in NYC, Denver, CO and Charlotte, NC area) 

Position Summary:  

Judi Health is building the technology infrastructure our nation needs to deliver the healthcare we deserve. The Architecture organization is responsible for the technical foundation the rest of the company builds on: the standards, patterns, and infrastructure that engineering teams use to move fast and build efficiently. The Caching team sits within Architecture's Core Platform function, owning the data access layer across the entire platform.  

As a Staff Engineer in Architecture, your influence extends beyond what you ship directly. The standards you set, the patterns you establish, and the decisions you document become the reference point for how caching is approached across the organization.

Claims processing, eligibility, accumulations, and prior authorizations drive highly interconnected, high-volume workflows where maintaining a consistent view of data across the platform is a significant architectural challenge. Decisions around caching, invalidation, and state propagation directly impact both performance and correctness, particularly where the cost of a stale or incorrect read is high. You will be directly responsible for defining consistency contracts, designing invalidation patterns, and balancing correctness and performance across a domain with varying tolerance for stale data. 

One of your first major initiatives will be architecting the caching strategy for our most critical domain: claims adjudication. This is a deeply embedded engagement. You will work directly within the domain by reviewing and analyzing real claims data and processing workflows to understand the caching and consistency requirements. This data flows across systems throughout the platform, directly influencing critical workflows including prior authorization, reporting, and member experience.  

Position Responsibilities:  

• Design, build, and operate the caching infrastructure that serves as the data access layer for one of the most complex domain models in American healthcare  
• Own the full lifecycle of cache design,  from eviction policy and service topology to invalidation architecture and operational recovery  
• Define and own the performance and correctness contracts between the caching layer and the services that depend on it  
• Drive adoption of caching best practices across engineering,  eliminating anti-patterns, building shared libraries, and making cache-aware design the default  
• Diagnose and resolve correctness, performance, and stability issues in the caching layer, including leading incident response and post-incident reviews  
• Set the technical bar for the caching team through design review, code review, and direct mentorship of senior engineers  
• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation to provide continuous operational support and rapid incident response  

Required Qualifications:  

• 10+ years of production engineering experience, with deep specialization in distributed systems and caching infrastructure  
• Production experience operating distributed caching systems, such as Redis/Valkey or, Memcached, at cloud scale, including cluster topology, eviction policy, replication, and failure recovery  
• Experience with multi-tenancy and the operational complexity of running shared caching infrastructure across many independent workloads  
• Deep understanding of cache consistency and the failure modes that emerge at scale, such as thundering herd, hot key saturation, cache leasing, and dual-write consistency problems, and the judgment to choose the right invalidation strategy for a given workload  
• Fluency with cache replacement algorithms beyond LRU (e.g., LFU, ARC, and probabilistic eviction) and the tradeoffs of multi-tier architectures when an in-process layer belongs alongside a shared distributed cache  
• Experience in cloud-native environments where redundancy, resource efficiency, and resiliency are first-class requirements, not afterthoughts  
• A track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives — driving decisions through influence and producing documentation that holds up over time  
• Strong written and verbal communication — you produce architectural guidance that the broader engineering organization depends on  
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity — at this level, you will be handed problems, not plans, and are expected to identify the right approach and drive it from first principles to production 
• Strong experience supporting 24/7 production on-call rotations, including responding to alerts and resolving incidents outside of standard business hours  

Preferred Qualifications:  

• Experience in healthcare, pharmacy benefits, or other regulated industries  
• Working familiarity with probabilistic data structures and when they belong in a caching architecture over standard key-value patterns  
• Experience with caching in real-time transactional processing domains — payments, financial services, insurance, or healthcare — where data correctness and timeliness have measurable downstream consequences  
• Familiarity with database replication and change data capture as mechanisms for cache invalidation and maintaining consistency with the source of truth  
• Systems-level programming experience in Rust, Go, or C/C++, particularly for performance-critical infrastructure components  
• Proficiency in Python for infrastructure tooling, automation, or service development  
• Experience with AWS/GCP for managed caching, database, and streaming services  
• Open-source contributions, technical publications, or conference presentations in distributed systems or infrastructure 

Nothing in this position description restricts management’s right to assign or reassign duties and responsibilities to this job at any time.