Principal Architect - AI Builder

Role Description

We are hiring a Principal Applied AI Architect to take ownership of how we build AI‑powered products and applications at CVS Health. This role sits within our Enterprise Architecture organization and is responsible for designing, building, and shipping AI applications across the enterprise.

• Identify high‑value AI use cases across CVS Health and shape them into products with clear scope, user need, and success criteria.
• Design and architect each AI system end‑to‑end, including retrieval, agent orchestration, tool and MCP integration, evaluation harnesses, observability, and human‑in‑the‑loop hand‑offs.
• Write product requirements, design documents, and architecture decision records for the AI products you own.
• Build production implementations using AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, and equivalents), with disciplined testing, review, and observability.
• Partner with platform and system owners to integrate AI applications cleanly with our enterprise platforms, identity, and data services, following CVS standards for security and compliance.
• Use modern AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and equivalents) as a primary production build tool to compress build cycles while maintaining high production quality.
• Apply seasoned engineering judgment to review AI‑generated code at architectural depth, catching integration mistakes, silent failure modes, and design drift before they reach production.
• Coach other architects and senior engineers on applied‑AI coding techniques and AI‑augmented workflows so they can speed up their own work and their teams’ work.
• Build reusable building blocks (agent skills, MCP servers, sub‑agents, prompt and evaluation libraries, reference implementations) from the products you ship so other teams can adopt them.
• Identify where coding agents and agentic workflows can speed up application, platform, and integration team work, and help those teams adopt the practice.
• Participate in cross‑functional architecture working groups covering applications, platforms, and integrations that use AI.
• Publish architecture decision records and reference implementations from the products you build so teams can adopt them.
• Mentor architects and engineers and conduct architecture reviews of AI systems built across the organization.
• Work with security and compliance on HIPAA, SOX, and PCI requirements as they apply to AI systems and data handling.
• Represent CVS Health in vendor evaluations and partner programs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Databricks) and stay connected to the open‑source AI ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering and architecture, with a demonstrated progression from production developer to enterprise architect to applied‑AI builder.
• 8+ years operating at the architecture altitude with a track record of systems you designed, built, and shipped.
• 2+ years building and shipping production AI applications using LLMs, agentic systems, RAG, MCP, and evaluation frameworks.
• Hands‑on experience with at least one major foundation model provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS Bedrock, or Azure OpenAI) and at least one agent framework (LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, Semantic Kernel/MAF), with a clear opinion on tradeoffs.
• Strong Python plus one additional production language (TypeScript, Java, Go, or similar).
• Solid system‑design fundamentals across distributed systems, APIs, cloud (Azure, AWS, or GCP), data pipelines, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Strong product instinct: able to identify what to build, scope it, and write the spec independently.
• Proven track record of AI applications shipped to production with disciplined evaluation, testing, and observability.
• Able to communicate clearly with both engineers and senior leadership.

Requirements

• Experience working with multiple foundation model providers and a clear point of view on when to use each.
• Experience building MCP servers and defining tool integrations for agent ecosystems.
• AI evaluation tooling experience (LangSmith, Braintrust, Promptfoo, or custom evaluation harnesses).
• Hands‑on experience using AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) as production build tools, not just IDE assistants.
• Experience publishing PRDs, product specs, or technical strategy documents as a hands‑on architect or staff engineer.
• Contributions to open‑source AI projects or communities (LangChain, MCP, agent frameworks, etc.).
• Healthcare, insurance, or financial services experience (HIPAA familiarity).
• Patent filings, conference talks, or published technical writing on applied AI.
• Cloud certifications are a plus but not required.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent 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. 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

• 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.