Senior Principal Software Engineer — Real-Time ML/LLM Systems

Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement; Nashville (TN); On-site; USD 144,200 - 288,400; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Paid time off

Retirement plan

Job summary

CVS Health is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead real-time, distributed systems across clinical decision-support applications on Google Cloud. You will design, implement critical components, mentor engineers, and ship production code with a focus on performance, reliability, and safety.

This hands-on role requires deep Python expertise, experience with LLM pipelines, and strong cloud architecture skills to deliver scalable, high-quality software for healthcare.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a strong record of delivering production systems at scale
• 5+ years as a hands-on Staff or Principal-level engineer (actively coding)
• Expert proficiency in Python including performance tuning, concurrency, and system optimization
• 5+ years building real-time distributed systems (event-driven, streaming, Pub/Sub) with latency and reliability requirements
• 5+ years working in a major public cloud (GCP preferred)
• Deep experience with microservices architecture, API design (REST), and resilient systems
• 3+ years building and operating production ML systems (MLOps, monitoring, deployment pipelines)
• 3+ years developing LLM-powered applications in production (prompt design, RAG/vector search)
• Experience building modern UI components with React or Angular
• Strong CS fundamentals in distributed systems, algorithms, and concurrency

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and execution — Lead the technical direction of a real-time, multi-service clinical platform on GCP, while personally building the most critical components
• Build production-grade LLM systems — Design and operate scalable LLM pipelines including prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, retrieval/vector search, OCR-based understanding, and guardrails
• Deliver real-time, high-performance systems — Architect distributed, event-driven services with sub-second SLAs under heavy load
• Operationalize machine learning — Lead deployment and lifecycle management of models on Vertex AI, including feature pipelines and drift detection
• Design for scalability and change — Build flexible APIs and microservices with strong testing, observability, and progressive delivery
• Raise the engineering bar — Drive code reviews and standards across testing, CI/CD, security, and observability
• Own outcomes end-to-end — Translate clinical and business needs into delivered solutions, monitor performance and iterate
• Partner across disciplines — Collaborate with Data Science, Product, Clinical SMEs, AI Governance, and Security teams to ensure enterprise standards

Skills

Python

Real-time distributed systems

GCP

Microservices

REST APIs

LLM / AI systems

CI/CD

Mentoring

UI frameworks (React/Angular)

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's or PhD in Computer Science / ML (a plus)

Tools

Vertex AI

GKE

Cloud Run

Pub/Sub

BigQuery

IAM

Job description

CVS Health is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead real-time, distributed systems across clinical decision-support applications on Google Cloud. You will design, implement critical components, mentor engineers, and ship production code with a focus on performance, reliability, and safety.

This hands-on role requires deep Python expertise, experience with LLM pipelines, and strong cloud architecture skills to deliver scalable, high-quality software for healthcare.