Principal Engineer API Platform

Role Description

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.

• Shape the developer experience for a Fortune 6 company from the ground up.
• Work with a high level of autonomy and leave a long-term imprint on how CVS engineers build and deliver software.

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).
• 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.

Requirements

• You are a recognized authority on API design, able to define and enforce standards for REST, GraphQL, event-driven, and MCP-based interfaces across the enterprise.
• You understand API lifecycle management from specification and contract-first design through versioning, deprecation, and eventual retirement.
• You can architect systems for delivering APIs and integrations to multi-environment targets, including public cloud (GCP, AWS, Azure) and on-premises gateways.
• You have deep experience with API gateway technologies, service mesh, and the infrastructure concerns that underpin reliable, high-throughput API delivery.
• You understand what it takes to build and operate an API catalog at enterprise scale, including taxonomy, discoverability, and ownership models.
• You 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.
• You can define and operationalize secure-by-default patterns that developers on the platform pick up naturally.
• You understand the regulatory and compliance landscape relevant to healthcare APIs (HIPAA, FHIR, CMS interoperability rules) and can translate those requirements into platform guardrails.
• You are comfortable working directly with security architecture teams to validate designs and respond to findings.
• You will lead the design and delivery of AI capabilities embedded into the developer platform.
• You will architect and build MCP servers that expose the enterprise API catalog as a queryable, real-time context.
• You understand how to prompt, instrument, and evaluate large language models in production contexts.
• You will define the strategy for how AI tooling integrates with the portal, catalog, and gateway delivery pipeline.
• You are a servant leader who can articulate a clear technical vision and rally engineers across multiple teams around it.
• You actively participate in architecture reviews, design documents, and pull requests.
• You think in platforms, not features: you design for extensibility, self-service, and the needs of teams you have never spoken to.
• You are data-driven in how you measure platform health, developer adoption, and the impact of the APIs your platform delivers.
• You understand the importance of mentorship and invest genuinely in growing the engineers around you.
• You will partner with product managers, architects, and program leaders to maintain a coherent strategy and roadmap across the platform.
• You write clean, well-tested, production-grade code in JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, React) and Java/Spring Boot.
• You champion mature CI/CD practices, including automated testing, contract testing for APIs, and safe deployment strategies.
• You have a strong grasp of observability and know how to make distributed API systems understandable.
• You stay current with emerging technologies and can evaluate them honestly.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package designed to support the physical, emotional, and financial well-being of colleagues and their families.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Paid time off.
• Retirement savings options.
• Wellness programs and other resources, based on eligibility.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience (High school diploma plus 4 years relevant 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.