Principal Architect

Position Summary

We are hiring a Principal Applied AI Architect to take ownership of how we build AI-powered products and applications at CVS Health. This role sits within our Enterprise Architecture organization and is responsible for designing, building, and shipping AI applications across the enterprise.

Responsibilities

• Identify high-value AI use cases across CVS Health and shape them into products with clear scope, user need, and success criteria.

• Design and architect each AI system end-to-end, including retrieval, agent orchestration, tool and MCP integration, evaluation harnesses, observability, and human-in-the-loop hand-offs.

• Write product requirements, design documents, and architecture decision records for the AI products you own.

• Build production implementations using AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, and equivalents), with disciplined testing, review, and observability.

• Partner with platform and system owners to integrate AI applications cleanly with our enterprise platforms, identity, and data services, following CVS standards for security and compliance.

• Use modern AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and equivalents) as a primary production build tool to compress build cycles while maintaining high production quality.

• Apply seasoned engineering judgment to review AI-generated code at architectural depth, catching integration mistakes, silent failure modes, and design drift before they reach production.

• Coach other architects and senior engineers on applied-AI coding techniques and AI-augmented workflows so they can speed up their own work and their teams' work.

• Build reusable building blocks (agent skills, MCP servers, sub-agents, prompt and evaluation libraries, reference implementations) from the products you ship so other teams can adopt them.

• Identify where coding agents and agentic workflows can speed up application, platform, and integration team work, and help those teams adopt the practice.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering and architecture, with a demonstrated progression from production developer to enterprise architect to applied-AI builder.
• 8+ years operating at the architecture altitude with a track record of systems you designed, built, and shipped.
• 2+ years building and shipping production AI applications using LLMs, agentic systems, RAG, MCP, and evaluation frameworks.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major foundation model provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS Bedrock, or Azure OpenAI) and at least one agent framework (LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, Semantic Kernel/MAF), with a clear opinion on tradeoffs.
• Strong Python plus one additional production language (TypeScript, Java, Go, or similar).
• Solid system-design fundamentals across distributed systems, APIs, cloud (Azure, AWS, or GCP), data pipelines, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Strong product instinct: able to identify what to build, scope it, and write the spec independently.
• Proven track record of AI applications shipped to production with disciplined evaluation, testing, and observability.
• Able to communicate clearly with both engineers and senior leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with multiple foundation model providers and a clear point of view on when to use each.
• Experience building MCP servers and defining tool integrations for agent ecosystems.
• AI evaluation tooling experience (LangSmith, Braintrust, Promptfoo, or custom evaluation harnesses).
• Hands-on experience using AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) as production build tools, not just IDE assistants.
• Experience publishing PRDs, product specs, or technical strategy documents as a hands-on architect or staff engineer.
• Contributions to open-source AI projects or communities (LangChain, MCP, agent frameworks, etc.).
• Healthcare, insurance, or financial services experience (HIPAA familiarity).
• Patent filings, conference talks, or published technical writing on applied AI.
• Cloud certifications are a plus but not required.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

Pay Range

The Typical Pay Range For This Role Is $144,200.00 - $288,400.00 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.