Staff Software Architect

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.

We are looking for a Staff Software Architect to serve as a technical leader within the Clinical Insights Engine team at CVS Health. This is a senior individual contributor role with enterprise-wide influence. You will define the long-term software and systems architecture vision for the Clinical Insights Engine platform, drive cross-functional alignment on engineering strategy, and lead the design of mission-critical systems that power clinical AI models, ML inference pipelines, enterprise reporting, and large-scale healthcare analytics. You will operate as a thought leader and trusted authority — setting direction for architecture decisions across multiple engineering squads, ML teams, and product verticals.

Responsibilities

• Drive the end-to-end software architecture vision and roadmap for the Clinical Insights Engine platform across GCP and Azure environments
• Serve as technical authority for system design and architecture decisions, providing guidance and governance across multiple engineering squads and product teams
• Lead the design of highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and cost-optimized platforms supporting clinical AI/ML workloads — including LLM inference pipelines, document processing at scale, and real-time clinical data services
• Define and govern ML architecture patterns — including feature stores, model registries, model serving infrastructure, experiment tracking, and MLOps pipelines — ensuring reproducibility, observability, and production-grade reliability
• Lead architecture for LLM-integrated systems including prompt engineering frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, embedding stores, and clinical NLP processing
• Define CIE-wide engineering standards, reference architectures, and platform patterns that promote consistency, reuse, and velocity across squads
• Define enterprise software standards, architecture patterns, and reference architectures adopted across HCD and the broader CVS Health engineering community
• Partner with CIE portfolio leads, product managers, and clinical stakeholders to align technical architecture with clinical program outcomes and business strategy
• Represent CIE in enterprise architecture forums, HCD data governance councils, and cross-functional technical leadership groups within CVS Health
• Champion engineering best practices across CIE squads: event-driven design, API-first development, data quality at source, and self-service platform patterns
• Identify and proactively address architectural risk, technical debt, and data quality issues across CIE's clinical data platform
• Mentor senior engineers and architects across CIE squads; build a culture of technical rigor, curiosity, and innovation
• Ensure all CIE systems meet HIPAA compliance, enterprise security standards, and clinical data governance requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software or data architecture, platform engineering, or a closely related field
• 5+ years of experience designing enterprise-scale cloud systems in GCP and/or Azure in a production healthcare or regulated industry environment
• Deep expertise in cloud-native services relevant to CIE's stack: BigQuery, Dataflow, Vertex AI, Cloud Run, GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, or Azure equivalents
• Demonstrated experience architecting clinical AI/ML platforms — including feature stores, model serving infrastructure, MLOps tooling, and LLM integration patterns applied to healthcare data
• Strong command of distributed systems design: event streaming, asynchronous processing, API gateway patterns, service mesh, and fault-tolerant pipeline architecture
• Experience defining and executing multi-year platform roadmaps across large, multi-squad engineering programs
• Proven ability to influence and align senior technical and business stakeholders across portfolio and product boundaries without direct authority
• Deep familiarity with clinical and healthcare data domains: clinical notes, EHR data, claims, pharmacy, member, and provider data
• Strong understanding of HIPAA, PHI handling requirements, clinical data privacy regulations, and enterprise security frameworks
• Experience working in SAFe Agile, program increment planning, and large-scale Agile delivery

• Google Cloud Professional Architect, GCP Data Engineer, or Azure Solutions Architect certification
• Hands-on experience with LLM-based clinical document processing, RAG architectures, OCR pipelines, or clinical NLP — directly applicable to CIE's patient fact extraction and potential conditions workflows
• Experience designing and operating production ML platforms at scale using Vertex AI Pipelines, Kubeflow, MLflow, or equivalent
• Familiarity with data mesh principles, domain-oriented data ownership, and federated governance — directly relevant to CIE's multi-portfolio operating model
• Background in real-time ML serving, A/B testing infrastructure, and model monitoring and drift detection in clinical AI contexts
• Prior experience in health plan, healthcare delivery, or clinical operations environments; familiarity with clinical workflows and value-based care programs is a strong plus
• Published thought leadership, conference presentations, or patents in AI/ML systems, clinical NLP, or healthcare data architecture

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field required
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or equivalent advanced technical experience strongly preferred

The typical pay range for this role is: