Staff Software Development Engineer - Application Architecture

Staff Software Development Engineer – Application Architecture

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.

At CVS Health, we're building a world of health around every consumer and surrounding ourselves with dedicated colleagues who are passionate about transforming health care. As the nation's leading health solutions company, we reach millions of Americans through our local presence, digital channels, and more than 300,000 purpose ‑ driven colleagues —caring for people where, when, and how they choose in a way that is uniquely more connected, more convenient, and more compassionate. And we do it all with heart, each and every day.

Position Summary

If you're eager to make a meaningful impact through deep technical leadership, consider a role in technology with CVS Health. Our journey calls for senior ‑ level engineers who can shape the future of pharmacy prior authorization platforms and solutions for CAS (Clinical Authorization System).

As a Staff Software Development Engineer – Application Architecture, you serve as a technical authority for CAS architecture and design. You define, evolve, and govern architectural patterns across multiple teams while remaining hands ‑ on with design, code, and critical technical decisions. This role is central to CAS modernization as we evolve from a large on ‑ prem monolith to a cloud ‑ ready, API ‑ first, domain ‑ aligned platform.

You partner closely with engineering teams, product, UX, QA, DevSecOps, SRE, data, and enterprise architecture to ensure solutions are secure, reliable, performant, compliant, and aligned with long ‑ term strategy.

Key Responsibilities

Application Architecture & North Star Delivery

• Drive decomposition of legacy monolithic components into cloud ‑ ready services and modular architectures.
• Balance short ‑ term delivery needs with long ‑ term architectural sustainability and modernization goals.
• Define and deliver a clearly articulated CAS North Star Architecture, describing the target ‑ state platform, core principles, reference patterns, and a phased migration strategy from legacy to future state.
• Architect a cloud ‑ ready, hybrid ‑ capable platform supporting coexistence of on ‑ prem and cloud workloads during migration, with clear service boundaries and integration contracts.
• Drive API ‑ first design with consistent standards for versioning, backward compatibility, contract testing, and developer experience to enable internal and partner interoperability.
• Establish domain ‑ aligned services and modular components (DDD ‑ inspired bounded contexts) to reduce coupling and enable independent delivery by multiple teams.
• Design and promote event ‑ driven architectures where appropriate, publishing authorization and clinical lifecycle events to enable scalable workflows and downstream integration without point ‑ to ‑ point dependencies.
• Define a pragmatic strangler ‑ fig migration strategy for decomposing the legacy monolith, including incremental cutovers, coexistence patterns, and measurable milestones.

Architecture Governance & Reference Implementations

• Own CAS architecture governance, including principles, standards, reference architectures, reference implementations, ADRs, and a lightweight, auditable exception process with time ‑ bound remediation.
• Produce and maintain executable reference patterns for common concerns such as API design, service templates, security controls, integration patterns, data access, and observability.
• Define and report architecture governance metrics (e.g., standards adoption, exception volume and age, architectural debt remediation, service SLO attainment, and change quality indicators).

Full ‑ Stack & Platform Architecture (End ‑ to ‑ End)

• Define architectural patterns spanning presentation, service, integration, data, and platform layers, ensuring alignment between UI experiences, APIs, and backend workflows.
• Establish standards for frontend architectures (componentized UI, accessibility, performance budgets) aligned with shared design systems and backend contracts.
• Design backend services using modern stacks (e.g., .NET, Java, Node.js) with clean architecture, testability, and clear separation of concerns.
• Standardize synchronous and asynchronous integration patterns (REST/JSON, messaging, streaming, gRPC where applicable) with secure partner connectivity.
• Drive platform architecture aligned to Azure and/or GCP, including containerization, environment strategy (dev/test/stage/prod), networking, secrets management, and landing ‑ zone alignment.
• Partner with DevSecOps to define CI/CD and DevSecOps standards, including automation ‑ first testing, security scanning, policy gates, infrastructure as code, and safe deployment strategies (blue/green, canary).

Reliability, Security & Operational Excellence

• Design for reliability and operability by default, defining SLIs/SLOs, graceful degradation, bulkheads, and resilient integration patterns.
• Define and enforce security and compliance architectures for regulated healthcare data, including least ‑ privilege access, encryption, auditability, identity controls, and data classification standards.
• Establish observability requirements across services (metrics, logs, traces, alerts), operational runbooks, and incident response expectations aligned to SLOs.
• Participate in incident analysis and drive architectural remediation to prevent recurrence.

Data, Analytics & Operational Insights

• Architect end ‑ to ‑ end data and analytics solutions supporting CAS operational reporting and insights, including ingestion, transformation, semantic layers, and consumption through dashboards, APIs, and downstream services.
• Define data modeling and SQL performance standards, data governance controls (quality checks, lineage, auditability), and reliable KPI/metric contracts suitable for regulated data.
• Establish consistent data integration patterns across heterogeneous platforms, including error handling, retries, and pipeline observability.
• Set architectural standards for integrating analytics and automation tooling (e.g., dashboards/KPIs, analytics automation, workflow orchestration, Python ‑ based data processing).

AI / GenAI Architecture & Responsible Enablement

• Identify and enable AI ‑ assisted capabilities that improve prior authorization outcomes and throughput (e.g., intake automation, summarization, triage, exception routing) with strong human ‑ in ‑ the ‑ loop controls.
• Define AI service patterns (model ‑ as ‑ a ‑ service behind stable APIs) to decouple domain services from model implementations and enable iterative upgrades.
• Establish MLOps and Responsible AI guardrails, including reproducible pipelines, model/version registries, monitoring, drift detection, explainability, bias evaluation, rollback, and auditability.
• Ensure AI solutions comply with PHI security and privacy requirements, including data minimization, encryption, access controls, and audit logging.

Interoperability & Ecosystem Integration

• Design interoperable solutions aligned with clinical and claims ecosystems, including standards ‑ based approaches such as FHIR/HL7 where applicable.
• Define canonical data contracts, mapping strategies, and resilient interface patterns (idempotency, retries, circuit breakers, dead ‑ letter handling) with clear operational ownership.

Cross ‑ Functional Leadership & Influence

• Partner with Product, UX, QA, DevSecOps, SRE, Data, and Enterprise Architecture to align technical solutions with business outcomes.
• Communicate architectural vision, tradeoffs, and decisions clearly to technical and non ‑ technical stakeholders.
• Mentor senior engineers and tech leads and influence engineering standards without direct people ‑ management responsibility.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated impact at scale.
• Proven experience leading application architecture in large, complex enterprise systems.
• Strong hands ‑ on expertise in at least one modern backend stack (.NET, Java, Node.js) and distributed system design.
• Deep experience designing APIs, integrations, and data ‑ driven systems.
• Strong understanding of cloud ‑ ready architectures, CI/CD, and secure SDLC practices.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills across organizational boundaries.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience modernizing monolithic systems into cloud ‑ native or hybrid architectures.
• Experience with DDD, event ‑ driven architecture, and API governance.
• Hands ‑ on full ‑ stack experience across UI, services, integration, data, and platform layers.
• Experience applying AI/ML or Generative AI