Staff Software Engineer - Search / AI

Role Description

CVS Health is looking for hands-on, passionate people who want to join a high energy and growing team to make a difference in customers’ lives and who want to be on the forefront of digital innovation that aims to reinvent what a pharmacy and a health care company can be in the digital world. Currently, we are seeking a Staff Software Engineer – Search / AI who as a Senior technical leader, be responsible for driving architecture, design, and delivery of scalable, cloud-native platforms built on microservices architecture and AI capabilities. This role combines deep hands-on engineering with strategic leadership to build intelligent, distributed systems. The right candidate will be a strong analytical thinker and be able to simplify complex problems, processes or projects into component parts explore and evaluate them systematically. We love to collaborate and help each other and we want someone to share that ideology.

Expectations for the Role

• Drive enterprise architecture and technical strategy with strong focus on microservices-based design and AI platform engineering
• Design and develop highly scalable microservices architectures, including APIs, domain-driven services, and event-driven systems
• Lead the development and integration of AI/ML solutions, including LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic frameworks
• Develop scalable data platforms and pipelines to support real-time and batch processing across enterprise systems
• Enable AI-powered capabilities, including intelligent search, recommendations, and decision-support systems
• Lead the development and optimization of search algorithms and systems utilizing technologies such as Elastic/OpenSearch/Solr
• Drive adoption of CI/CD, DevOps, and automated testing practices using modern tooling (GitHub, Jenkins, CircleCI, Harness)
• Ensure high standards of system reliability, observability, and performance through monitoring and operational excellence
• Collaborate with product managers, architects, and business stakeholders to deliver scalable, modular, and intelligent solutions
• Lead design reviews, defining best practices for microservices design, API contracts, and service governance, and mentoring engineers
• Drive responsible AI practices, including model evaluation, governance, and production readiness

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, including full software development lifecycle (design, development, testing, deployment)
• 5+ years of experience building enterprise-scale cloud-native applications (GCP, Azure, or AWS)
• 5+ years of programming skills in any one of the following programming languages: Java, Python, Kotlin, or Go, with an emphasis on backend and API-driven development
• 3+ years of experience in designing and developing microservices architecture, including service decomposition, API design, and event-driven patterns
• 2+ years of experience integrating AI/ML solutions, including familiarity with LLMs, RAG architectures, or AI-enabled applications
• 2+ years of experience designing and implementing distributed systems and microservices at scale, including resiliency, scalability, and fault tolerance
• Experience with any search technology such as ElasticSearch/OpenSearch/Solr/Lucene
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Strong understanding of observability, logging, monitoring, and production support

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building intelligent data-driven systems, including personalization, recommendations, and analytics platforms
• Proficiency in machine learning, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, and mathematical methods, with exposure to search relevance and ranking techniques
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts and business implications effectively to diverse stakeholders

Education

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience (HS diploma + 4 years relevant experience)

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