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.
Why This Role Is Important to Arcadia
Customer Insights takes on the work that doesn't fit a one-size-fits-all product — custom data models, bespoke dashboards, registries, and long-running embedded programs — sitting between a platform and a plan.
This role is the first at Arcadia dedicated to Medicaid policy analysis, and it sits on one of our most visible accounts: a state Medicaid agency that is taking direct responsibility for a much larger fee-for-service population. A broader Arcadia team already serves the agency in a variety of ways — risk stratification, dashboards and reporting, quality measurement, and analytics on the state's Medicaid member and claims data — and that relationship is growing. You will work alongside that team and take the lead on the policy-driven analytic work: interpreting program rules and policy documents into analytic logic, and building the registries, data marts, and dashboards that put it to use.
That takes a rare combination: policy fluency to tell a customer what the data can and cannot support, customer presence to be trusted in the room with state program staff and partners, and the technical skill to build the deliverables yourself. We are looking for someone who can ramp on all three quickly. Just as important, this work moves at a pace that is only possible with AI-assisted development: you will be expected to pick up our AI coding and analysis tools quickly and use them heavily from your first weeks, with careful human review.
What Success Looks Like
In 3 months
Get productive quickly with the team's AI-assisted workflow — using AI coding and analysis tools to ramp into the state program's eligibility, claims, and provider data, the program rules and policy context behind it, and the analytic logic and deliverables already in production
Join customer and partner working sessions and begin contributing in the room — answering, in real time, what a proposed definition, threshold, or policy change does to the data and the member population
Independently deliver your first piece of work end to end — a stratification or registry refinement, a data mart component, or a dashboard — with your own policy interpretation and QA behind it
In 6 months
Own the day-to-day analytic workstream — the weekly customer cadence, request prioritization, and same-day ad hoc asks — as a credible presence with state program staff, prime-contractor and vendor counterparts, and data owners, with the current owner stepping back to an oversight role
Own production-grade registries, data marts, and dashboards, with documented methodology, data dictionaries, and calibration against the customer's published figures
Bring other analysts up to speed on the work — the data, the logic, and the customer context — starting in your first months, so coverage and capacity extend beyond any one person
In 12 months
Be the recognized expert on Medicaid program policy and its analytic implications for Arcadia's state program work, trusted with the most ambiguous and highest-stakes questions
Hold the methodology standard for the body of work — reviewing major deliverables, codifying playbooks, and keeping the work resilient so the account's analytic capability keeps running smoothly as the scope and team grow
Extend the work into the broader analytic roadmap — cost and utilization, access and equity, care management effectiveness, and state program performance — as scope grows
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 experienc

Work arrangement
Yes