Lead Director, AI/ML & Data Engineering

Lead Director, AI/ML & Data Engineering

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.

This is a U.S.-based REMOTE position; candidates must reside within the United States.

Primary Duties And Responsibilities

Data Engineering & Feature Enablement

• Build and scale enterprise data ingestion, transformation, and quality frameworks to support AI/ML use cases across IT operations, security, and business functions.
• Deliver reusable datasets, feature pipelines, and data products with strong metadata, lineage, privacy, and compliance controls.
• Partner with enterprise data, governance, and security teams to align stewardship models, data access patterns, and PHI/PII protections.
• Define and maintain data engineering standards, reference architectures, and operational playbooks.

AI Engineering & DevSecOps

• Translate enterprise AI needs into scalable platform capabilities and reusable components (e.g., RAG frameworks, vector search services, evaluation harnesses, prompt libraries, reusable agents, model registries, and monitoring dashboards).
• Lead and mature DevSecOps practices for AI/ML, embedding security, automation, and compliance across the AI lifecycle.
• Drive cross-functional alignment across security, infrastructure, architecture, and application teams to accelerate adoption and reduce duplication.
• Conduct technology assessments and proofs of concept to evaluate models, cloud services, and technical approaches.

MLOps / LLMOps & Platform Operations

• Establish and operate enterprise MLOps, LLMOps, and GenAIOps platforms, including CI/CD for models and prompts, deployment automation, observability, and lifecycle governance.
• Own platform reliability and performance for model serving and AI application runtimes, including SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, and on-call readiness.
• Standardize production controls such as model versioning, canary deployments, rollback strategies, policy enforcement, and audit-ready change management.

People Leadership

• Recruit, retain, and develop high-performing engineering managers and senior individual contributors.
• Build clear career paths and foster a culture of continuous learning and engineering excellence.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software and/or data engineering experience delivering large-scale platforms, including 5+ years leading managers and cross-functional teams.
• 8+ years' experience in full-stack and platform engineering across large-scale, multi-cloud environments.
• 8+ years' experience in data engineering experience across batch + streaming, data quality, metadata/lineage, and platform-scale storage/query patterns.
• 8+ years building and operating Data Engineering, AI Engineering, DevOps, and MLOps capabilities supporting multiple product teams and mission-critical workloads.
• 8+ years in DevSecOps, MLOps, LLMOps, and GenAIOps, plus 5+ years in regulated environments with strong security, privacy, and audit requirements (secure cloud/hybrid, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and enterprise IAM).

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven ability to lead product-oriented platform teams and manage roadmaps, dependencies, and executive stakeholders.
• Experience managing budgets and vendor relationships for platform tooling, data services, and managed model or service providers.
• Experience establishing operating rhythms, performance metrics, and transparent reporting for delivery, platform health, and cost.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical risk, cost, and value to senior leadership.

Education

Bachelor's degree from accredited university or equivalent work experience (HS diploma + 4 years relevant experience).