Principal Engineer - Digital

Position Summary:

CVS Health is looking for a Principal Engineer - Digital to serve as one of the most impactful individual contributors in the organization. This is a role for someone who can see, shape, and set the technical direction of our entire digital ecosystem.

You will be part of the team that has the technical authority across mobile (iOS & Android), web, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML platforms, backend systems, security, developer tooling, and agentic AI. You will define architectural standards, evaluate emerging technologies, mentor senior engineers, and make the high-stakes technical decisions that no single product team can own alone.

If you thrive at the intersection of systems thinking, deep technical craft, and organizational influence — and want your work to touch the health of tens of millions of Americans every day - this is the role for you.

Key Responsibilities:

Architecture & Technical Strategy:

• Define and own the end-to-end digital architecture strategy, ensuring coherence and consistency across mobile, web, cloud, and AI surfaces
• Author and steward Architecture Decision Records that guide engineering decisions across multiple teams and domains
• Evaluate and validate major architectural choices — service boundaries, data models, API contracts, and infrastructure patterns — before they become expensive to change
• Identify and eliminate architectural debt proactively, balancing short-term delivery pressure with long-term platform health
• Establish and enforce engineering standards, design principles, and best practices across the full digital portfolio
• Drive technology radar decisions — selecting, adopting, and deprecating frameworks, tools, and platforms across the organization
• Define web architecture standards including application framework selection, rendering strategy (SSR, CSR, ISR), and micro-frontend approaches where appropriate
• Lead performance engineering for web: Core Web Vitals targets, bundle optimization, lazy loading strategy, and CDN/edge caching architecture
• Govern third-party script strategy to protect page performance, user privacy, and security

AI Architecture, Agentic AI & AI Solutioning:

• Define the organization's AI architecture strategy across the full spectrum - foundational model selection, inference infrastructure, vector databases, embedding pipelines, and responsible AI design patterns
• Ability to build and strategize AI systems to be consumed for Mobile apps/Web and the personalization, recommendations using the data analysis and AI/ML tools
• Lead agentic AI system design using orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, or equivalent), including agent loop design, tool use, memory, and guardrails
• Ensure all AI systems meet explainability, fairness, and compliance requirements - particularly in a regulated healthcare context.
• Identify AI solutioning opportunities across the digital product portfolio and drive proof-of-concepts through to production-grade implementation.

Cloud Infrastructure & Backend Systems:

• Architect scalable, resilient cloud infrastructure - including compute, storage, networking, and managed services strategy
• Define backend service architecture: microservices decomposition, event-driven systems, API gateway patterns, and service mesh configuration
• Lead platform engineering efforts: developer portals, internal tooling, shared libraries, and golden-path templates that accelerate every product team
• Design and govern data architecture decisions: databases at scale, caching layers (Redis, CDN) and streaming pipelines
• Establish SLO/SLA frameworks, error budget policies, and on-call standards that balance reliability with engineering velocity

Security & Compliance:

• Lead digital security architecture: zero-trust network design, identity and access management, secrets management, and service-to-service authentication
• Lead threat modeling exercises for major platform changes, surfacing and mitigating risks before they reach production
• Define and enforce SAST, DAST, SCA, and container scanning standards across all CI/CD pipelines
• Own compliance architecture for HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II, and PCI-DSS as applicable - translating regulatory requirements into concrete technical controls
• Partner with the security team on vulnerability response, penetration testing remediation, and incident response planning
• Drive a security-by-default engineering culture through tooling, training, and code review standards

Technical Leadership & Organizational Enablement:

• Provide technical mentorship and coaching to senior and staff engineers - elevating the craft of everyone around you, not just delivering your own output
• Partner with Engineering Directors, VPs to shape multi-year technology strategy and communicate tradeoffs in business terms
• Drive cross-team technical alignment on shared concerns — preventing duplication, resolving conflicting approaches, and building shared platforms where warranted
• Create and maintain technical documentation, architecture diagrams, and decision records that serve as the institutional memory of the platform
• Represent engineering in cross-functional forums with Product, Design, Data, and Business stakeholders - translating between technical depth and business impact

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with organization-wide technical scope
• 5+ years of hands-on expertise in at least two of: native iOS (Swift/SwiftUI), native Android (Kotlin/Jetpack), or modern web (React/Next.js/TypeScript)
• 5+ years of cloud architecture experience (GCP, Azure or AWS) running production workloads at scale
• 5+ years of security engineering experience with real compliance exposure
• 3+ years of AI engineering experience: shipping production systems built on foundation models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or open-weight equivalents), including prompt engineering, RAG, evaluation pipelines, and fine-tuning where appropriate
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building agentic AI systems using orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, or equivalent - including agent loop design, tool integration, memory, and guardrails
• 2+ years of broad AI architecture expertise: model selection tradeoffs, inference infrastructure, vector databases, embedding pipelines, and responsible AI design patterns
• 2+ years of AI Delivery experience: designing and shipping AI/ML-powered products at production scale, spanning both generative and predictive systems

Preferred Qualifications:

• Track record of driving cross-functional technical decisions at an organizational level, not just within a single team
• Experience establishing CI/CD, testing, and observability standards that multiple teams adopt and rely on
• Familiarity with MLOps practices and model fine-tuning pipelines
• Flutter or cross-platform mobile development experience
• Experience building internal developer platforms, design systems, or platform engineering capabilities
• Open-source contributions or published technical writing
• Experience with App Store Connect API, Play Developer API, and automated release tooling (Fastlane, etc.)
• Familiarity with observability and APM tooling (Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Firebase Performance)

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience (HS diploma + 4 years relevant experience)