Principal 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.

Position Summary

We're hiring a Principal Architect to take ownership of how we do cloud-native architecture and multi-cloud infrastructure strategy at CVS Health. This person will sit within our Enterprise Architecture organization and be responsible for the architecture, standards, and technical direction behind our public cloud platforms and broader hybrid infrastructure posture. We run workloads across Azure, AWS, and GCP, with a growing footprint on Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE) alongside our on-prem private cloud (OpenShift, KVM, Dell PowerFlex). We need someone who can build and maintain the reference architectures, IaC standards, and workload identity patterns that let our engineering teams build and operate cloud-native systems consistently and securely. There is real work to do around workload identity, runtime selection, autoscaling guidance, and FinOps. Teams are asking for concrete standards they can follow. Familiarity with observability practices and on-prem/private cloud is valuable here, since cloud-native systems don't operate in isolation, but the core of this role is public cloud and cloud-native architecture. This is a hands‑on role. You'll write architecture docs, build proof‑of‑concepts, configure cloud infrastructure, and present to leadership.

*This position can work remotely from anywhere in the continental USA.

Responsibilities

• Own the enterprise cloud-native reference architecture across Azure, AWS, and GCP, including networking, identity, compute, and storage patterns.
• Lead standards work around cloud security, identity, and IAM, moving teams away from static secrets and toward modern, federated identity patterns.
• Define landing zone and networking standards, including account/subscription structure, VPC/VNet topology, connectivity, and segmentation, that teams can build on consistently.
• Provide guidance on compute runtime selection, including containers vs. VMs vs. bare metal vs. serverless, with a clear decision framework for teams.
• Define and evolve Kubernetes standards across EKS, AKS, and GKE, including cluster architecture, multi‑tenancy, and platform hardening.
• Own infrastructure‑as‑code standards (Terraform, Pulumi, Helm, ArgoCD/GitOps) and drive adoption across engineering teams.
• Help teams connect autoscaling and capacity planning behavior to actual telemetry signals.
• Push FinOps maturity forward by integrating cost data into cloud tooling, establishing unit economics, and working toward open billing standards like FOCUS.
• AI + Cloud: Identify where AI/ML adds practical value in our cloud operations, such as anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and smarter automation.
• Define architecture standards for AI‑powered systems (agents, RAG pipelines) running in the cloud, covering scaling, latency, token costs, and related signals.
• Ensure new AI‑powered platforms are architected correctly from day one.
• Architecture Community: Participate in cross‑functional architecture working groups focused on cloud‑native and hybrid cloud standards.
• Publish architecture decision records and reference implementations that teams can actually use.
• Mentor architects and platform engineers; conduct architecture reviews to raise the bar across the org.
• Work with security and compliance on HIPAA, SOX, and PCI requirements as they apply to cloud infrastructure.
• Represent CVS Health in vendor evaluations and stay connected to the open‑source ecosystem (CNCF and related communities).

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years in infrastructure, cloud architecture, or platform engineering
• 8+ years of architecture work in cloud infrastructure at a large enterprise
• Solid experience with at least two of Azure, AWS, or GCP, including networking, identity, compute, and storage
• 5+ years with Kubernetes in production (EKS, AKS, GKE, or OpenShift)
• Strong hands‑on experience with infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, Pulumi, Helm, ArgoCD, or similar)
• Experience with workload identity and zero‑trust networking patterns
• Proven track record writing architecture standards that other teams adopted and followed
• Able to communicate clearly with both engineers and senior leadership

Preferred Qualifications

• On‑prem / private cloud experience (OpenShift Virtualization, KVM/libvirt, VMware, Dell PowerFlex or similar storage)
• Observability experience, including OpenTelemetry, Grafana (Mimir, Loki, Tempo), Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk, or Dynatrace
• Experience defining SLOs/SLIs and alerting strategies at an organizational level
• Streaming platforms such as Kafka or Confluent
• AIOps or ML‑based anomaly detection experience
• FinOps background, including cloud cost optimization, chargeback, and unit economics
• Service mesh (Istio, Envoy, Linkerd) or eBPF‑based tools (Cilium, Pixie)
• Involvement in open‑source communities (CNCF, OpenTelemetry, etc.)
• Healthcare, insurance, or financial services experience (HIPAA/SOX familiarity)
• Cloud certifications are a plus but not required

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. Equivalent work experience accepted.

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. 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

We take pride in offering a comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits that reflects our commitment to our colleagues and their families. 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. The benefits for this position include medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, retirement savings options, wellness programs, and other resources, based on eligibility. Additional details about available benefits are provided during the application process and on Benefits Moments.

We anticipate the application window for this opening will close on: 12/31/2026.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state and local laws.

Our Company Culture

Our Work Experience is the combination of everything that's unique about us: our culture, our core values, our company meetings, our commitment to sustainability, our recognition programs, but most importantly, it's our people. Our employees are self‑disciplined, hard working, curious, trustworthy, humble, and truthful. They make choices according to what is best for the team, they live for opportunities to collaborate and make a difference, and they make us the #1 Top Workplace in the area.