Principal AI Platform Engineer – Clinical Data

CVS Health; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 144,000 - 288,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus program

Equity award

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

CVS Health is seeking a Principal Engineer to design and build a data platform on Google Cloud, guiding AI-assisted development and operations for patients, providers and payers. You will lead cross-team architecture, implement scalable data solutions, and drive governance, security and compliance in a regulated healthcare setting.

The role emphasizes hands-on coding in Python and Go/Java/C#, cloud-native engineering, and collaboration with executives.

Qualifications

• 12+ years building production distributed systems.
• 5+ years leading architecture across multiple teams at staff or principal level.
• Experience designing and delivering large-scale batch and streaming data platforms in a demanding engineering environment.
• Current, hands-on coding experience in Python and either Go, Java, or C#.
• Deep experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud, including GKE, BigQuery, Spanner, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Vertex AI and VPC Service Controls.
• Production experience with machine learning or large language model systems, including retrieval, extraction, evaluation and serving at scale.
• Extensive use of AI agents across your own design, development, testing and code review work, with measurable impact on delivery.
• A creative, collaborative approach to problem solving, and comfort working through ambiguity and changing requirements.
• Experience in a regulated environment, including designing controls and supporting systems through audits.
• Strong written communication and diagramming skills, and experience presenting to senior executives.

Responsibilities

• Design the platform architecture on Google Cloud with engineering leadership.
• Design systems to evolve quickly as needs change, and lead their evolution over time.
• Frame key trade-offs in isolation, data rights, scale, reliability and cost, and recommend options.
• Write production code for the platform's most critical and complex components.
• Turn prototypes into reference implementations that teams can adopt.
• Lead the development of practices for using AI coding agents, including specifications, guardrails, code review, evaluation and human oversight.
• Run pilots with engineering teams, measure the effect on delivery speed and quality, and recommend practices for wider adoption.
• Maintain architecture, diagrams and documentation as code, so engineers and AI agents work from the same source.
• Design AI-assisted operations for incident triage, runbook automation, and capacity and cost management.
• Build in approval gates, least-privilege access for AI agents, and a full audit trail of agent actions.
• Propose service-level objectives and the observability needed to measure the impact of automation.
• Design for enterprise control conformance within the systems we build, including change management, separation of duties, access reviews, data lineage, and model and prompt governance.
• Automate the collection of audit evidence, in partnership with security, privacy, compliance and AI governance teams.
• Explain complex systems clearly to engineers, product leaders, executives and customers, in writing and in diagrams.
• Help develop technical business cases and present them to senior leadership.

Skills

Python

Go/Java/C#

Distributed systems

Leadership

Communication

Education

Bachelor's in CS/Engineering

Master's preferred

Tools

GKE

BigQuery

Spanner

Dataflow

Pub/Sub

Vertex AI

VPC Service Controls

Job description

CVS Health is seeking a Principal Engineer to design and build a data platform on Google Cloud, guiding AI-assisted development and operations for patients, providers and payers. You will lead cross-team architecture, implement scalable data solutions, and drive governance, security and compliance in a regulated healthcare setting.

The role emphasizes hands-on coding in Python and Go/Java/C#, cloud-native engineering, and collaboration with executives.