Technical Lead

Job Description

Job Description

Experience:

• 12+ years in software engineering, including at least 5 years in a Tech Lead or equivalent role.

The role:
Lead the technical delivery of a healthcare payer care management estate. You hold design authority, lead and develop a mixed onshore/offshore engineering team, and act as the client's main technical contact. This is a hands-on role. You will be in the code as well as leading the team.

The work:

• Hold design authority across the applications in scope and their interfaces.
• Own code-level investigation for complex defects and sign off root cause analysis.
• Set and enforce coding standards, review gates and release quality.
• Assess the impact of change across a large, incompletely documented dependency chain.
• Shape and drive the modernization of legacy applications. Find the areas to modernize first, plan the steps in stages, and keep risk low for live production systems.
• Bring AI-assisted development into the team's daily work, including code understanding, documentation, test generation and refactoring. Set guardrails so it stays safe and consistent in a regulated environment.
• Lead, coach and mentor the engineering team across onshore and offshore locations. Grow technical depth, review work and build ownership so the offshore team can deliver on its own.
• Run the onshore/offshore operating model: daily handoffs across time zones, work allocation, clear acceptance criteria, and one quality bar for both locations.
• Turn client and business priorities into technical work the team can deliver, and keep stakeholders informed on risk, progress and dependencies.
• Make sure designs and changes meet healthcare regulatory and data-protection requirements, including HIPAA, PHI handling and auditability.

Essential:

• 5+ years of healthcare payer experience, ideally in care management, utilization management, or clinical and member-facing systems. Working knowledge of payer data and workflows (members, eligibility, authorizations, claims, providers).
• 5+ years leading and coaching engineering teams. You have grown developers' skills, run code reviews as a teaching tool, and built team capability rather than being the single point of expertise.
• 4+ years delivering in an onshore/offshore model. You have led distributed teams across time zones, set up knowledge transfer and handoff practices, and kept quality consistent across locations.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience modernizing legacy applications. Examples include re-platforming, refactoring monoliths, upgrading Java and Oracle estates, and moving business logic out of the database layer, all without disrupting business operations.
• 1+ year of practical experience using AI tools for software development, such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code or similar. That includes using them to understand legacy code, generate documentation and tests, and speed up refactoring, with clear judgment about where they can and can't be trusted.
• 10+ years of deep Oracle and PL/SQL, plus 8+ years of Java across versions from 1.8 onward.
• 6+ years in integration architecture: interface engines, EDI, file-based and API integration.
• Able to reverse-engineer undocumented systems and produce the documentation that should have existed.
• Credible with client architects and with third-party platform vendors.

Strongly preferred:

• 3+ years with Cognizant CareAdvance: design or technical leadership on the platform, including the custom code layer that payers run alongside the vendor product.
• Experience with Client Cross plans or other large US health plans.
• Familiarity with healthcare interoperability standards such as HL7 and FHIR, and with CMS interoperability requirements.