Executive Director, Technology Operations & Platform Engineering

CVS Health•Hartford, CT

2d•$175,100 - $334,750

About The Position

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: Are you an operational and infrastructure leader who takes pride in running the technology backbone that a multi-billion-dollar business depends on? CVS Health is seeking an Executive Director, Technology Operations & Platform Engineering to own the reliability, resilience, and operational excellence of the technology organization serving both Meritain Health, one of the nation's largest third-party administrators, and our Wholesale portfolio of companies. This is a foundational, cross-organization leadership role at the heart of a major business transformation, where you will ensure the engine keeps running flawlessly while continuously strengthening the platform it runs on. In this role, you will own two complementary mandates: running the technology estate at scale across both business lines, and engineering the platforms and infrastructure that it runs on. On the run side, you will own technology operations: incident and SLA management, release and change governance, environment management, disaster recovery, and business continuity. On the build side, you will own platform engineering, cloud infrastructure modernization, SRE, and the technical direction for how platforms are architected for reliability and scale. You will be the accountable engineering and operational executive for infrastructure outcomes, partnering closely with enterprise infrastructure and security organizations, and the trusted point of accountability for senior business and technology stakeholders.

Requirements

12+ years in technology operations, infrastructure, or platform engineering, including 5+ years in senior leadership roles.
Demonstrated experience leading enterprise infrastructure modernization and resilience programs while maintaining production stability at scale.
Deep operational discipline across SLA, incident, release, and change management, with hands-on knowledge of SRE principles and modern observability.
Proven experience establishing disaster recovery and business continuity programs, including tiered application classification and consistent attainment of recovery SLAs.
Proficiency in cloud engineering and infrastructure architecture (Azure, GCP, or equivalent), with the technical credibility to make infrastructure architecture, resilience, and platform operability decisions.
Strong executive presence and communication skills, with a proven track record as a trusted operational partner to senior business and technology leaders, and the ability to develop financial cases and prioritize investments.
Experience executing enterprise security and compliance priorities, supporting audits, and meeting client security and data requirements in a regulated environment.
Proven ability to lead operations across multiple business lines or a complex, multi-domain technology portfolio.
Demonstrated people leadership developing operations and infrastructure leaders and building high-performing, resilient teams.
Demonstrated experience standing up and leading SRE and reliability engineering capabilities for cloud-native platforms, including infrastructure-as-code, automation, and error budget practices.

Nice To Haves

Healthcare, payer, or financial services experience operating in a HIPAA or comparably regulated environment.
Experience operating within a large enterprise shared-services model, providing governance and accountability for outcomes executed by central infrastructure and security teams.
Experience with AI-led, autonomous, or self-healing system ecosystems that improve reliability and reduce operational toil.
ITIL or equivalent IT service management framework depth, combined with modern DevOps and SRE practice experience.
Experience supporting third-party administration, managed care, or health benefits administration technology environments.
Graduate degree preferred.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end technology operations across both Meritain and the Wholesale portfolio, including incident, SLA, release, change, and environment management, with consolidated front-line support and coordinated deep engineering support through the application teams.
Lead continuous infrastructure modernization and cloud migration as an engineering program, re-platforming and re-architecting workloads to meet business growth, welcome season readiness, and resilience requirements, governing capacity and partnering with key enterprise infrastructure and security stakeholders.
Establish and maintain platform architecture and cloud infrastructure design, owning the reliability, scalability, and operability standards that govern how new cloud-native and AI-enabled platforms are built to run at scale, and leading their transition into sustainable operations.
Own disaster recovery and business continuity, establishing tiered application classification (Tier 1, Tier 2 etc), assessing systems against resilience and recovery gaps, and ensuring DR and recovery SLAs are consistently developed and met across both business lines.
Own tech debt strategy and remediation across infrastructure, code, operational, and security debt, leading engineering-led re-architecting and rebuilding where needed, and governing prioritization in close partnership with application and enterprise teams.
Establish and run the technology security and compliance operating model, covering vulnerability management, secure development controls, identity and certificate governance, perimeter protection, and GRC compliance, supporting annual audits and client security requirements.
Develop strong observability and portfolio health management, building a single, integrated view of application and system health, trends, and proactive risk management across the technology estate.
Own performance engineering across the platform estate, including performance tuning, capacity planning, and scalability design to sustain high availability and resilience across both business lines.
Stand up and lead the Site Reliability Engineering function for new cloud-native platforms, embedding reliability through engineering practices including infrastructure-as-code, automation, error budgets, and production-readiness gates, not operational controls alone.
Own the platform engineering roadmap and technical strategy, aligning platform and infrastructure investments to business growth and the transformation program.
Establish a tiered, modern change-management model that enables fast, automated delivery for new cloud-native platforms while maintaining rigorous controls for high-risk legacy systems, partnering with engineering leaders to define production readiness gates and protect production stability.
Serve as the operational point of accountability for senior stakeholders, providing proactive operational health reporting and rapid, credible response to escalations.
Own technology operations budget, vendor partnerships, resource planning, developing financial cases and prioritizing investments to optimize operations spend and improve cost efficiency
Build, develop, and mentor a strong operations leadership bench, establishing clear succession paths and a culture of operational excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement.