Senior Software Engineer

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Med-QUEST, Hawaii's Medicaid program, provides healthcare coverage to just under 400,000 people in Hawaii's diverse community, including working families, children, older adults, and people with disabilities. New federal mandates introduced in 2025 through H.R. 1, including work requirements for expansion populations and a shift from annual to semi-annual eligibility redeterminations, create urgency and opportunity for Med-QUEST to modernize its technology, redesign service delivery, and stand-up new capabilities.

As the senior engineering expert in Med-QUEST's Customer Experience Office, the Senior Software Engineer serves as the definitive technical authority for the division's customer experience and digital service delivery programs and sets the engineering standards and technical direction the division depends on. This position advises the CX Transformation Officer and senior leaders, translating complex engineering realities into recommendations that shape strategy, prioritization, and procurement.

The role requires a holistic, systems-level view of Med-QUEST's technology landscape and the ability to move fluidly across the stack, tracing how a change in legislation, eligibility policy, or system architecture ripples through integrations, data flows, and user-facing services. Projects are not standalone; each touches and depends on others, and the engineer must hold that full picture while diving deep to determine what is technically possible, what is sustainable, and how to make it work.

Day to day, the Senior Software Engineer leads technical discovery to understand how existing systems behave, where they fail, and how they should be modernized, and designs, builds, and maintains software, integrations, and system components using modern engineering practices when hands‑on delivery is the most effective path. The work moves between hands‑on engineering and higher‑level judgment: evaluating trade‑offs across feasibility, risk, cost, compliance, and timelines, scrutinizing vendor‑delivered systems against what was promised, and translating federal policy requirements into secure, workable technical direction.

Priorities include:

• Engineering system changes for H.R. 1 work requirement implementation
• Building and improving online renewal flows to reduce eligibility worker burden
• Maintaining the infrastructure behind Hawaii's nation‑leading ex parte renewal rates
• Modernizing complex legacy Medicaid systems into modular, modern architectures while maintaining 24/7 service

The Senior Software Engineer delivers work both directly and collaboratively with vendor teams and contractors, setting engineering standards, evaluating deliverables and change orders, and holding that work accountable for cost, quality, security, and interoperability, while building internal engineering capacity through mentoring staff and partners.

This is senior digital service delivery work navigating complex technical, policy, and operational systems, meeting time‑sensitive federal requirements, and ensuring compliance and effective service delivery.

This position's official title is "Customer Experience Transformation Fellow (Software Engineer)." This announcement refers to the role as Senior Software Engineer. The two refer to the same position.

LEGAL AUTHORIZATION TO WORK REQUIREMENT: The State of Hawaii requires all persons seeking employment with the government of the State shall be citizens, nationals, or permanent resident aliens of the United States, or eligibles under federal law for unrestricted employment in the United States.

EDUCATION: Graduation from an accredited four (4) year college or university with a bachelor’s degree or four years of equivalent experience.

EXPERIENCE: Minimum five (5) years of…