Principal Software Development Engineer

CVS Health•Irving, TX

6d•$144,200 - $288,400

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 Principal Software Engineer for the next-generation compute platform powering CVS Health's PBM underwriting and financial metrics across revenue, rebate, specialty, and P&L. You will set technical direction for a platform that processes hundreds of millions of claims-level records under tight latency SLAs, replacing a legacy compute engine. The role is equal parts deep solution design, big-data architecture, and storytelling — translating PBM financial logic into systems that finance, actuarial, and account teams trust and that engineering teams can extend without breaking. You will lead architecture decisions, mentor senior and staff engineers, and own the technical narrative with executive stakeholders.

Requirements

12+ years building production software systems; 3+ years at staff/principal scope
Big-data fluency at scale — designed and operated systems processing hundreds of millions to billions of rows; comfortable reasoning about throughput, latency, partitioning, and cost trade-offs across batch, streaming, and OLAP workloads
System design depth — decomposes ambiguous business problems into bounded services with clear contracts; reasons about consistency, failure modes, backpressure, and evolution from day one
Architecture leadership — drives ADRs and design reviews, sets standards (boundaries, testing strategy, schema evolution), and enforces them through tooling rather than tribal knowledge
Solution design judgment — picks the simplest architecture that meets the SLA; knows when to strangle a legacy system versus rewrite, when to split a service versus keep it monolithic
Strong analytics intuition — SQL fluency, data modeling, parity/reconciliation patterns, comfort partnering with finance and actuarial stakeholders to debug metric drift
Hands-on with modern JVM stacks (Java, Spring Boot, Gradle) and SQL-first persistence (JOOQ or peer)
Performance engineering — profiling, query-plan reading, caching strategy, hitting sub-second-to-low-minute SLAs on large datasets
Communication and presentation — produces whitepaper-quality design docs, executive-readable architecture narratives, and demos that move decisions; comfortable presenting to VP/SVP audiences
Storytelling — frames technical work in business outcomes; turns metrics, migrations, and incidents into narratives stakeholders remember
Technical leadership without authority — mentors staff/senior engineers, raises the hiring bar, drives cross-squad alignment
Cloud-native delivery mindset — container-first, observability-first, CI/CD discipline, regardless of specific cloud
PBM, healthcare claims, pharmacy pricing, rebates, Financial, or insurance underwriting domain experience

Nice To Haves

Experience replacing or strangling a legacy compute/ETL engine in production without business freeze
Experience with Azure databricks is preferred
Hexagonal / ports-and-adapters architecture with enforcement (ArchUnit or equivalent)
OLAP and columnar engines (StarRocks, BigQuery, ClickHouse, Snowflake, Druid)
Streaming/event-driven systems (Kafka), GraphQL gateways, multi-tenant API design
GCP (BigQuery, Vertex, Composer/Airflow) and/or Azure-to-GCP migration patterns
Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and modern CI/CD platforms
Public technical writing, conference talks, or open-source contribution

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for a platform that processes hundreds of millions of claims-level records under tight latency SLAs, replacing a legacy compute engine.
Lead architecture decisions.
Mentor senior and staff engineers.
Own the technical narrative with executive stakeholders.
Drives ADRs and design reviews, sets standards (boundaries, testing strategy, schema evolution), and enforces them through tooling rather than tribal knowledge.
Picks the simplest architecture that meets the SLA; knows when to strangle a legacy system versus rewrite, when to split a service versus keep it monolithic.
Frames technical work in business outcomes; turns metrics, migrations, and incidents into narratives stakeholders remember.
Mentors staff/senior engineers, raises the hiring bar, drives cross-squad alignment.