Fractional Software Architect at HLH Holdings LLC dba Highlight Health – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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About This Position
Overview
Highlight Health is a mission-driven company that protects consumer rights and controls healthcare costs exclusively for self-funded employers and their stop loss carriers. We are a profitable, fast-growing company without private equity investors.
We are currently upgrading our core operations into a sophisticated, proprietary Claims Intelligence Platform. This isn’t a prototype; it is an innovative system of record handling protected health information (PHI) and generating financial recommendations with real-world legal and economic weight.
Highlight Health engineers new ways to protect consumer rights and control healthcare costs for self-funded employers. Nearly every American has felt the pain of the skyrocketing cost of healthcare. Highlight Health brings them solutions. We use our subject-matter expertise to reduce costs for employers and relieve ordinary Americans of burdensome medical costs. Highlight Health is proud of its inclusive workplace that brings together highly skilled leadership and employees from all walks of life.
At Highlight Health, the output of your work matters. You will be the technical authority on a platform where the “correctness bar” is exceptionally high — because the results directly affect what employers pay for healthcare. If you want to own the quality standard and build something that genuinely matters, we would love to hear from you.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities – First 90 Days
- Establish the modular architecture scaffold, module boundaries, and CI/CD pipeline before any feature code ships
- Design and build the core PostgreSQL schema and entity data model — the canonical structure that every module writes to and reads from, with migrations configured from day one
- Define and publish interface contracts for every module
- Design and implement the multi-tenant data access layer with security enforced at both the application and database layers
- Produce the coding standards document covering naming conventions, error handling, logging discipline, and pull request review criteria
- Review every pull request touching core data access patterns, financial logic, or module boundaries throughout the engagement
- Triage and unblock workstreams for the development team
- Transfer architectural knowledge to the engineering team continuously, not just at the end
The Technical Stack
- Backend: Python 3.12, FastAPI, async SQLAlchemy 2.0, Alembic migrations
- Database: Azure Database for PostgreSQL — HIPAA-eligible, zone-redundant, row-level security enforced at both application and database layers
- Infrastructure: Azure Container Apps (dev / staging / prod), Azure Service Bus for async job processing, Azure DevOps CI/CD, Azure Blob Storage
- Frontend: React 18 / Vite SPA for the internal application; Next.js for the external client portal
- AI and OCR: Anthropic Claude via Azure AI Foundry for document extraction; Azure Document Intelligence for OCR processing
- Quality: pytest, Ruff linting, automated module boundary enforcement in CI
Experience and Qualifications
- Experience: 15+ years in software architecture, with at least 5 years in a senior or principal individual contributor capacity.
- Technical depth: Proven track record shipping Python / PostgreSQL backends in production. You can design a data access layer, write a migration strategy, and configure a CI/CD pipeline from scratch.
- Regulated environments: You understand the nuances of working with sensitive data (HIPAA, SOC 2, or PCI) and prioritize audit trails and data access controls.
- Consultative mindset: You have done fractional or consulting engagements before. You know how to drive high impact and hand off cleanly.
- Modern development workflow: You are comfortable governing teams using AI-assisted tools like Cursor and Claude Code to maintain high quality at a fast pace.
Engagement
- 90-day FT intensive build phase, followed by a 90-day PT engagement
- Possibility for FT engagement after 180 days
Compensation and Benefits
- Starting Compensation: $20,000/monthly
- If you are based in the Philadelphia area, you will have the option of working in-office on a flexible schedule.