Description

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.

Position Summary

CVS Health is looking for a Staff Software Development Engineer who isn't afraid to use all their knowledge and communication skills to tackle complex problems. Our ideal candidate is detail-oriented and able to collaborate on the improvement of our software and systems. You will be involved in the structural design process, estimating costs, and performing quality control throughout the stages of implementation. A first-class staff engineer will be someone whose engineering expertise translates into streamlined and cost-effective processes.

To ensure success as a Staff Software Development Engineer, you should demonstrate specialized engineering knowledge and experience while designing, providing guidance, and implementing solutions to complex problems. You will work with business, information, and technology teams to recommend and implement technology solutions needed to enable leading-edge capabilities and develop comprehensive patterns that outline how those capabilities get realized in response to evolving business needs.

Key Responsibilities

• End to End Solution Leadership: Ultimate accountability and oversight for driving solutions from cradle to grave for a given domain by providing leadership and oversight to application architects and tech leads who are intimately familiar with the application architectures within their specific domain.
• Architecture and design reviews: Play a key role in architecture design reviews and identify gaps and recommend design changes. Actively lead and participate in the Architecture community to drive modernization opportunities for the advancement of Aetna technology while keeping in mind the complexities of our IT landscape.
• Contribute to and scale AI infrastructure to facilitate quick experimentation and iteration.
• Develop Reference architecture and implementation: Providing leadership, coaching and guidance to Application Development, Infrastructure and EA to develop/assemble architectures for cloud-native applications to be applied to applications targeted for refactor and optimization.
• Application profile identification: Leverage significant technical expertise and domain knowledge to identify Aetna apps targeted for refactor and optimization for cloud.
• Proof of concept technology support: Lead and drive proofs-of-concept and technology deep-dives specific to partner technologies.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to evolve early-stage ideas into robust, production-ready systems.
  Develop data domains and products for different consumption archetypes like Reporting, Data Science, AI/ML, and Analytics.
• "Whatever it takes" attitude to help clear technical roadblocks: Advise and assist Application development teams with technical roadblocks such as performance challenges within a solution.
• Cost optimization identification: Engage with appropriate stakeholders to recommend or assess opportunities to drive cost efficiencies aimed at simplicity, configurability and eventual elimination of technical debt associated with Aetna applications.
• Tech Debt: Manage tech debt within a given portfolio and develop solution proposals to reduce them.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building large scale business applications using modern technologies and architecture.
• 8+ years of experience designing complex integrations with a focus on performance engineering and loose coupling using APIs, microservices, and event-driven architecture.
• 8+ years of experience and proficiency with modern languages, frameworks, and technologies.
• 5+ years of experience facilitating implementation of north star architectures by delivery teams through mentoring and building POCs, starter code, and other collaborative activities.
• SME level understanding of cloud design and architecture for one or more public cloud provider(GCP preferred) to deliver large-scale distributed solutions across the full enterprise stack.
• SME level technical skills in the following areas: application, data, integration and, security architecture/design.
• SME level understanding of APIs (Rest, GraphQL, gRPC. Etc.) and microservices-based architecture is a must.
• Experience working with technologies that work as glue between modern applications and legacy infrastructure leveraging streaming platforms like Kafka.
• Experience in enterprise development tools and methodologies (XP, Agile) including DevSecOps and DataOps.
• Substantial experience with requirements analysis, estimation, systems and application design, and testing.
• Hands-on technologists with coding skills and proficient in modern technology stacks (Cloud, DevOps, Kafka etc.)
• Experience in agentic architecture-based implementations and advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation.
• Understanding of both SQL and NoSQL database technologies as well as Cloud database technologies.
• Ensure reliability, availability, and scalability of data pipelines through effective monitoring and incident management.
• Implement best practices in reliability engineering and collaborate with DevOps teams for seamless deployment and operation of data systems.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in developing production systems with clean, robust, reliable, and maintainable code.
• Strong interpersonal collaboration and communication skills, ability to work with high ambiguity and minimum supervision.
• Facilitates adoption of cloud-native/cloud-first architectures.
• Experience integrating with legacy mainframe/mid-range applications including developing roadmaps for modernization of the applications.

Preferred Qualifications

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills required to ideate solutions that are sufficient and feasible to both the business leads and the technical teams.
• Exceptional organizational, analytical, problem-solving, strategic thinking, and time management abilities.
• Experience with optimization skills to improve performance, scalability, and usability of our applications.
• Ability to develop technical briefs and detailed solution designs.
• Extensive knowledge of engineering processes, structural design, and system optimization.
• Experience with agile development, SAFe Agile experienced preferred.
• Direct, hands-on experience architecting and building production solutions specifically using Vertex AI, GKE, LLMs and streaming services.
• Relevant GCP Certifications are a bonus.

Education

• Bachelor's degree from accredited university or equivalent work experience.
• Master's degree preferred.

Pay Range

The typical pay range for this role is:

$106,605.00 - $260,590.00

This pay range represents the base hourly rate or base annual full-time salary for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls. The actual base salary offer will depend on a variety of factors including experience, education, geography and other relevant factors. This position is eligible for a CVS Health bonus, commission or short-term incentive program in addition to the base pay range listed above. This position also includes an award target in the company's equity award program.

Our people fuel our future. Our teams reflect the customers, patients, members and communities we serve and we are committed to fostering a workplace where every colleague feels valued and that they belong.

Great benefits for great people

We take pride in our comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits - investing in the physical, emotional and financial wellness of our colleagues and their families to help them be the healthiest they can be. In addition to our competitive wages, our great benefits include:

• Affordable medical plan options, a 401(k) plan (including matching company contributions), and an employee stock purchase plan.
• No-cost programs for all colleagues including wellness screenings, tobacco cessation and weight management programs, confidential counseling and financial coaching.
• Benefit solutions that address the different needs and preferences of our colleagues including paid time off, flexible work schedules, family leave, dependent care resources, colleague assistance programs, tuition assistance, retiree medical access and many other benefits depending on eligibility.

For more information, visit https://jobs.cvshealth.com/us/en/benefits

We anticipate the application window for this opening will close on: 11/28/2025

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state and local laws.