Principal Engineer, Health Data & AI Platform

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

Job summary

CVS Health is seeking a Principal Engineer to design and build a scalable data platform on Google Cloud, guiding AI agents to develop and operate it. This role blends platform design, engineering, and AI governance in a regulated healthcare context, requiring deep distributed systems expertise and strong communication with executives.

You will lead architectural direction across teams, mentor engineers, and ensure observability, security, and cost controls while delivering high-impact data and

Qualifications

• 12+ years 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 the platform architecture on Google Cloud with engineering leadership.
• 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.
• 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

Distributed systems

Architecture leadership

Python

Go/Java/C#

Cloud platforms

Machine learning

AI governance

Education

Bachelors degree in CS/Engineering

Master's degree preferred

Tools

GKE

BigQuery

Spanner

Dataflow

Pub/Sub

Vertex AI

Job description

CVS Health is seeking a Principal Engineer to design and build a scalable data platform on Google Cloud, guiding AI agents to develop and operate it. This role blends platform design, engineering, and AI governance in a regulated healthcare context, requiring deep distributed systems expertise and strong communication with executives.

You will lead architectural direction across teams, mentor engineers, and ensure observability, security, and cost controls while delivering high-impact data and