Principal Analyst, Medicaid Policy Analysis

Arcadia is the most trusted healthcare platform powering outcomes. We transform complex healthcare data into trusted intelligence, helping providers, payers, and life sciences organizations act with clarity, make confident decisions, and achieve measurable clinical, operational, and financial outcomes. Built on a comprehensive data foundation spanning tens of millions of patient lives, Arcadia combines advanced analytics and responsible AI to surface meaningful insights, coordinate action, and improve performance at scale. Our approach to AI and automation is governed and transparent — designed to strengthen human expertise, not replace judgment or obscure responsibility. Hundreds of organizations rely on Arcadia to improve cost, quality, and outcomes. Backed by Nordic Capital, we continue to invest in our platform, AI capabilities, and people as we pursue our purpose: helping healthcare deliver better outcomes for every person, every community, and every generation. What You'll Be Doing Medicaid policy analysis • Interpret state and federal Medicaid program rules, eligibility and aid-code structures, benefit and coverage design, and program guidance — translating them into precise, testable analytic logic (cohort definitions, code sets, exclusions, stratification criteria) and documenting the interpretation so decisions are auditable • Advise senior customer leadership on what the data can and cannot support — whether a proposed definition is measurable, what the volumes look like, what a threshold does to caseload, cost, or provider capacity — and anticipate how policy changes (fee-for-service transitions, waivers, provider network rules) affect the data and the questions ahead Technical analytical delivery • Turn ambiguous policy and operational questions into member and provider data marts, cohort and stratification logic, and registry extracts — in SQL (and Python where needed) on Foundry and Redshift/Athena • Deliver them in the format the customer needs — dashboards, recurring reports, Excel, and leadership decks • Root-cause data-quality issues — reconcile counts across sources, trace bad fields to the source, and agree definitions for undocumented fields and codes with the customer's data staff Customer presence and engagement • Serve as the senior analytic voice for state program leadership, policy and data staff, prime contractors, and vendor partners — participating in recurring working sessions and translating between policy, operational, and technical audiences • Set priorities, scope, and timelines with Customer Management, and hold real authority to push back on what is and isn't feasible or worth building • Create client-facing materials — leadership summaries, detailed methodology decks, decision memos, technical explainers — tailored to audiences from highly technical data counterparts to policy and executive stakeholders What You'll Need To Have • Working knowledge of how health programs and managed care plans work, and the ability to turn policy documents and program rules into analytic logic. Direct Medicaid or managed care plan experience is a plus • Clinical code and claims fluency — ICD-10, CPT/HCPCS, and revenue codes to build clinical cohorts; claims, eligibility, and provider/NPI data (NPPES, enrollment files); and judgment about claims timing and completeness • Hands-on, demonstrable fluency with AI coding and analysis tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) as the core of how you work. Picking these tools up quickly and using them heavily is central to how you will onboard and how much you can deliver in this role. Be ready to show us what you have built with AI assistance, how fast you turn work around, and how you review and validate it • Advanced SQL (CTEs, window functions, performance on large claims and eligibility tables) and data modeling, to a real engineering standard • Hands-on experience building dashboards and reports in a BI tool (QuickSight, Power BI, Tableau) and Excel, plus executive-ready decks Direct customer-facing experience with senior stakeholders — comfortable scoping ambiguous requests, navigating competing priorities, and exercising sound analytical judgment about what to build and what the data can support, on short timelines and without close oversight A track record of leading an analytic program end to end for senior customer or executive audiences — setting your own priorities, and operating without a project manager or close direction • Sound judgment with sensitive data and PHI What “Principal” means here This is the most senior analytic role on the Customer Insights team. It is expected that you can: • Set your own priorities and make the call with incomplete information • Act as the senior analytic voice with agency and partner leadership • Raise the bar for the analysts around you — through standards, review, and example • Don't need a project manager or close direction We are hiring for the combination of policy fluency, customer presence, and technical skill — we understand candidates may be strongest in one or two of these areas and will build the rest quickly, and speed of ramp matters more to us than any one credential. Tell us where you are strongest and how you have ramped before. Would Love For You To Have • Direct experience with a state Medicaid agency, a Medicaid-serving prime contractor or consultancy, or a Medicaid managed care plan — California Medi-Cal experience is a real plus • Familiarity with population health concepts: risk stratification, registries, care management, network adequacy, and access and equity analysis • Experience with Python and dbt; familiarity with the AWS ecosystem and its analytics tools (e.g., Athena, Redshift, QuickSight); comfort with orchestration tooling, Jira, Confluence, and GitHub-based workflows • Experience mentoring less experienced analysts Note: this list spans skills relevant to several facets of the role — we don't expect any given candidat