Principal AI Engineer

CVS Health • Washington, DC

1d • $144,200 - $288,400

About The Position

As a Principal AI Engineer, set the technical direction for designing, building, and operating enterprise-grade GenAI and agentic AI systems in a regulated healthcare environment. This hands-on technical leadership role works across data science, clinical, product, security, privacy, legal, and business teams to translate strategic priorities into trustworthy, scalable, production AI solutions. The position reports to the Lead Director on the Commercial team in the Aetna Technology organization.

The role architects and delivers production-grade AI solutions, builds scalable cloud-native systems, and owns the production AI lifecycle from experimentation and deployment through monitoring and continuous improvement. It also establishes secure and responsible AI practices, defines AI architecture and engineering standards, and provides technical leadership through design reviews, mentorship, architecture guidance, build-vs-buy decisions, and documentation.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in solution architecture or system design.
• 5+ years building large-scale microservices and APIs using Node.js, TypeScript, Java, or Python.
• 5+ years of hands-on AWS and/or GCP experience, including serverless, event-driven systems, CI/CD, and AI/ML.
• Hands-on experience with AWS Bedrock (models, agents, knowledge bases, guardrails, tuning, and evaluation), GCP Vertex AI (Model Garden, Agent Builder, Vector Search, Pipelines, and Tuning), or an equivalent platform.
• Production experience with agentic AI frameworks, RAG architectures, and vector databases.
• Strong Python skills for AI/ML engineering.
• Demonstrated experience delivering AI/ML systems in regulated environments with security, privacy, and audit requirements.
• Track record of influencing technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience (high school diploma plus 4 years of relevant experience).

Nice To Haves

• Healthcare, life sciences, or other regulated-industry experience, including HIPAA and PHI handling.
• Experience with Vertex AI Generative AI Studio, vector search orchestration, and agent capabilities.
• Experience with LLM evaluation tooling and observability platforms such as LangSmith, Arize, Langfuse, Ragas, or cloud-native equivalents.
• Experience with MCP servers and tool integration, agent-to-agent patterns, and agent memory design.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK), containers, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with fine-tuning techniques such as LoRA/PEFT and distillation, and with open-weight models.
• Familiarity with AI governance frameworks such as NIST AI RMF and ISO 42001, and model risk management.
• Agile/SAFe experience in large enterprises.
• Cloud certifications (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in AI/ML.

Responsibilities

• Architect and deliver production-grade GenAI and agentic AI solutions, including RAG, vector search, model integration, tool orchestration, guardrails, and evaluation across AWS and/or GCP.
• Build scalable, cloud-native AI systems using serverless and event-driven architectures, APIs, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and modern software engineering practices.
• Own the production AI lifecycle, from experimentation and deployment through monitoring, observability, performance and cost optimization, and continuous improvement.
• Establish secure and responsible AI practices addressing privacy, security, governance, auditability, model risk, and appropriate human oversight in a regulated environment.
• Define AI architecture, standards, and engineering best practices for agent orchestration, RAG, tool/MCP integrations, evaluation, and enterprise AI adoption.
• Partner with product, engineering, data, security, privacy, legal, compliance, and business teams to translate strategic needs into scalable AI solutions and influence technical direction.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership through design reviews, mentorship, architecture guidance, build-vs-buy decisions, and clear technical documentation.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Paid time off.
• Retirement savings options.
• Wellness programs.
• Other resources supporting physical, emotional, and financial well-being, based on eligibility.
• Eligible for a CVS Health bonus, commission, or short-term incentive program.
• Includes an award target in the company’s equity award program.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal