Principal Engineer, AI-Powered Clinical Data Platform

CVS Health; Texas; Hybrid; USD 144,000 - 288,000; Full time

Job summary

CVS Health in Texas seeks a Principal Engineer to design and grow a cloud-based platform that turns clinical, claims and document data into actionable insights for patients, providers and payers. You will lead AI-assisted development and operations, coding critical components and shaping governance in a regulated health environment.

You’ll partner with engineering, security and product leaders to build scalable data pipelines on Google Cloud (GKE, BigQuery, Spanner) and to define guardrails,

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience building production distributed systems.
• 5+ years leading architecture across multiple teams at the 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 platform architecture on Google Cloud with engineering leadership across data, identity, FHIR, data products, LLMs and rules engines.
• Lead evolution of platform design to adapt to changing needs while controlling trade-offs in scale, cost and reliability.
• Write production code for the platform's most critical components and turn prototypes into reference implementations.
• Lead AI-assisted development, defining guardrails, code review, evaluation and human oversight.
• Run pilots with teams, measure impact on delivery speed and quality, and share best practices.
• Maintain architecture diagrams and documentation as code for consistency.
• Design AI-assisted operations for incident triage, runbooks, capacity and cost management.
• Build approval gates, least-privilege access for AI agents, and an audit trail of actions.
• Propose SLOs and observability to measure automation impact.
• Design enterprise controls including change management, data lineage, and governance.
• Automate audit evidence collection with security, privacy, compliance, and AI governance teams.
• Explain complex systems to engineers, product leaders, executives and customers; provide diagrams.
• Help develop technical business cases and present to senior leadership.

Skills

Distributed systems

Architecture leadership

Python coding

Go/Java/C#

Google Cloud

GKE

LLM systems

AI agents

Regulated environment

Written communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or related field

Master's degree preferred

Tools

GKE

BigQuery

Spanner

Dataflow

Pub/Sub

Vertex AI

VPC Service Controls

Job description

CVS Health in Texas seeks a Principal Engineer to design and grow a cloud-based platform that turns clinical, claims and document data into actionable insights for patients, providers and payers. You will lead AI-assisted development and operations, coding critical components and shaping governance in a regulated health environment.

You’ll partner with engineering, security and product leaders to build scalable data pipelines on Google Cloud (GKE, BigQuery, Spanner) and to define guardrails,