Principal Software Engineer - Applied AI

At CVS Health, we're building a world of health around every consumer and surrounding ourselves with dedicated colleagues who are passionate about transforming health care.
As the nation's leading health solutions company, we reach millions of Americans through our local presence, digital channels and more than 300,000 purpose-driven colleagues - caring for people where, when and how they choose in a way that is uniquely more connected, more convenient and more compassionate. And we do it all with heart, each and every day.

CVS Health is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the design and delivery of enterprise-scale Generative AI solutions that power next-generation healthcare experiences. This role goes beyond hands-on coding—you will define technical strategy, establish architectural standards, and guide multiple teams in building secure, scalable, and cost-effective AI platforms across AWS (Bedrock) and Google Cloud (Vertex AI API). You will partner with product, security, compliance, and enterprise architecture teams to ensure solutions meet business objectives, regulatory requirements, and performance goals.

The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with leadership skills—capable of influencing cross‑organization architecture decisions, mentoring engineering teams, and driving responsible AI practices in production.

This position can work remotely anywhere in the continental USA.

• Lead end-to-end platform delivery of highly scalable, secure AI services and applications leveraging AWS Bedrock (Foundation Models, Knowledge Bases, Agents, Guardrails) and Google Cloud Vertex AI (Gemini via Vertex AI API, Agent Builder, Vector Search, Search & Grounding).
• Architect and implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions, integrating proprietary data from sources like Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage/Big Query, and using Bedrock Knowledge Bases and/or Vertex AI Search & Grounding with Vector Search to improve relevance and accuracy.
• Design solutions that use function/tool calling and multimodal input processing across both platforms (e.g., Bedrock Converse API and Vertex AI API), and integrate with enterprise systems via secure, well-governed service interfaces.
• Define reference architectures, golden paths, and guardrails for multi‑cloud AI development; drive adoption through design reviews, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), and clear SLOs for latency, resiliency, safety, and cost.
• Champion Responsible AI: implement safety filters, policy‑enforced guardrails, data minimization, and red‑team playbooks using capabilities such as Bedrock Guardrails and Vertex AI Safety.
• Partner with Security, Privacy, and Legal to ensure compliance with HIPAA/PHI, encryption, access control, and continuous auditability.
• Build evaluation and observability frameworks (groundedness, hallucination rates, relevance, toxicity, drift, cost attribution, A/B testing) and drive Fin Ops practices (prompt optimization, caching, batching, model selection) across clouds.
• Mentor Staff/Senior Engineers, elevate coding and design standards, and foster a culture of learning (design clinics, brown bags, communities of practice).
• Monitor the rapidly evolving AI landscape (LLMs, agent frameworks, platform features) and translate advances into actionable platform strategy and roadmaps.

• 10+ years of progressive, hands‑on IT experience spanning systems analysis, application design, application development, and leading engineering teams.
• 7+ years designing and developing modern microservices architectures and cost‑effective APIs for enterprise‑scale solutions.
• 7+ years managing stakeholder requirements and translating them into robust, secure, and scalable technical solutions.
• 5+ years building or leading large‑scale, mission‑critical applications with a focus on performance, resiliency, and security.
• 5+ years of hands‑on delivery for enterprise cloud initiatives on public cloud platforms (AWS and/or Google Cloud), including architecture, deployment, and optimization.
• 5+ years implementing Dev Ops and CI/CD automation, including containerization and…