Principal Engineer API Platform

We're building a world of health around every individual—shaping a more connected, convenient, and compassionate health experience. At CVS Health®, you'll be surrounded by passionate colleagues who care deeply, innovate with purpose, hold ourselves accountable, and prioritize safety and quality in everything we do. Join us and be part of something bigger—helping to simplify health care one person, one family, and one community at a time.

About The Role

At CVS Health, we are building a developer platform that sets the standard for how hundreds of engineers across Retail, Pharmacy, Health Solutions, and Aetna design, build, secure, and publish APIs. Our platform spans an internal and external developer portal, an API catalog that drives discovery and prevents duplication across the enterprise, and the systems responsible for delivering APIs, agent-to-agent integrations, and MCP servers to both cloud and on-premises gateways.

As a Principal Engineer on this platform, you will own the technical direction and architecture across several teams building these capabilities. This is a senior, cross-cutting role with significant organizational influence. You will establish the engineering practices that teams build on, define how APIs are designed and governed at scale, and lead the effort to embed AI-powered capabilities into the developer experience itself—from intelligent coding assistance that guides engineers toward compliant API patterns to MCP servers that make the enterprise API catalog available as a live, queryable context for AI-enabled workflows. This is a rare opportunity to shape the developer experience for a Fortune 6 company from the ground up, working with a high level of autonomy and leaving a long-term imprint on how CVS engineers build and deliver software.

Responsibilities

• API Design, Architecture & Governance
  • Define and enforce standards for REST, GraphQL, event-driven, and MCP-based interfaces across the enterprise.
  • Understand API lifecycle management from specification and contract-first design through versioning, deprecation, and eventual retirement.
  • Architect systems for delivering APIs and integrations to multi-environment targets, including public cloud (GCP, AWS, Azure) and on-premises gateways.
  • Leverage deep experience with API gateway technologies, service mesh, and the infrastructure concerns that underpin reliable, high-throughput API delivery.
  • Build and operate an API catalog at enterprise scale, including taxonomy, discoverability, and ownership models.
• Security & Compliance
  • Approach API security as a first-class architectural concern, with hands-on expertise in OAuth 2.0, OIDC, mTLS, scopes, rate limiting, and threat modeling for APIs.
  • Define and operationalize secure-by-default patterns that developers on the platform adopt naturally, without needing to become security experts.
  • Understand the regulatory and compliance landscape relevant to healthcare APIs (HIPAA, FHIR, CMS interoperability rules) and translate those requirements into platform guardrails.
  • Collaborate directly with security architecture teams to validate designs and respond to findings.
• AI-Powered Developer Experience
  • Lead the design and delivery of AI capabilities embedded into the developer platform, including AI-powered coding assistants that guide engineers toward CVS-compliant API patterns at the point of development.
  • Architect and build MCP servers that expose the enterprise API catalog as a queryable, real-time context, enabling AI agents and developer tools to surface relevant APIs, usage examples, ownership information, and compliance status during development workflows.
  • Understand how to prompt, instrument, and evaluate large language models in production contexts, and determine when AI is the right tool and when it is not.
  • Define the strategy for how AI tooling integrates with the portal, catalog, and gateway delivery pipeline, and drive adoption across CVS engineering teams.
• Technical Leadership & Platform Thinking
  • Articulate a clear technical vision, rally engineers across multiple teams around it, and stay close enough to execution to maintain high quality.
  • Actively participate in architecture reviews, design documents, and pull requests, providing feedback that improves both immediate work and long-term thinking.
  • Design for extensibility, self-service, and the needs of teams you have never spoken to.
  • Measure platform health, developer adoption, and the impact of APIs using data-driven approaches, and communicate that value clearly to engineering and business leadership.
  • Mentor and invest in growing the engineers around you, particularly those earlier in their careers.
  • Partner with product managers, architects, and program leaders to maintain a coherent strategy and roadmap across the platform.
• Engineering Craft
  • Write clean, well-tested, production-grade code in JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, React) and Java/Spring Boot, and uphold these standards across the teams you work with.
  • Champion mature CI/CD practices, including automated testing, contract testing for APIs, and safe deployment strategies across cloud and on-premises targets.
  • Ensure distributed API systems are observable through structured logging, distributed tracing, and meaningful metrics.
  • Stay current with emerging technologies and evaluate them honestly, including their trade-offs and the organizational cost of adoption.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a meaningful portion spent designing and delivering APIs at enterprise scale.
• 5+ years of direct experience with API security, including OAuth 2.0, OIDC, mTLS, rate limiting, and API threat modeling.
• 5+ years working with API gateway products and API management platforms (e.g., Apigee, Kong, Azure APIM, or equivalent).
• 5+ years of backend development in Java/Spring Boot and/or Node.js.
• 5+ years working with large public cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure), including the networking and identity primitives that underpin secure API delivery.
• 3+ years of experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams in a principal, staff, or architect-level capacity.
• 3+ years partnering with product management, architecture, and program management to shape roadmaps and deliver complex platform capabilities.
• Experience building or operating an API catalog, developer portal, or internal developer platform.
• Experience with GraphQL schema design and federation at scale.
• Experience with mature CI/CD practices, source control, automated testing, and contract-first API development.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building AI-powered developer tooling, including LLM-integrated coding assistants, MCP servers, or AI-assisted API design workflows.
• Experience working with agent-to-agent (A2A) integration patterns or MCP-based tooling.
• Experience with healthcare data standards and APIs, including FHIR, HL7, and CMS interoperability requirements.
• Experience designing and operating event-driven APIs using Kafka or comparable streaming platforms.
• Strong written communication skills, particularly in technical design documents and architecture decision records (ADRs).
• Demonstrated experience growing and mentoring senior engineers and technical leads.

Education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience (High school diploma plus 4 years relevant work experience).

Pay

The typical pay range for this role is $144,200.00 - $288,400.00. This 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.

Benefits

This full-time position is eligible for a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the physical, emotional, and financial well-being of colleagues and their families. Benefits include:

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Paid time off.
• Retirement savings options.
• Wellness programs and other resources, based on eligibility.