Staff Software Architect

CVS Health • Hartford, CT

3d • $106,605 - $260,590

About The Position

CVS Health is seeking a Staff Software Architect to serve as a senior individual-contributor technical leader within the Clinical Insights Engine team. The role has enterprise-wide influence and is responsible for defining the platform’s long-term software and systems architecture, aligning engineering strategy across teams, and leading design of mission-critical systems for clinical AI models, ML inference pipelines, enterprise reporting, and large-scale healthcare analytics. The architect will provide direction across engineering squads, ML teams, and product verticals.

The position spans GCP and Azure environments and includes architecture for scalable, fault-tolerant, cost-optimized clinical AI/ML platforms; ML infrastructure and MLOps patterns; LLM-integrated systems; and shared engineering standards and reference architectures. The role partners with portfolio leads, product managers, and clinical stakeholders, represents the team in enterprise architecture and governance groups, mentors senior technical colleagues, and ensures systems meet HIPAA, enterprise security, and clinical data governance requirements.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of experience in software or data architecture, platform engineering, or a closely related field.
• At least 5 years of experience designing enterprise-scale cloud systems in GCP and/or Azure in a production healthcare or regulated-industry environment.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native services relevant to the CIE stack, such as BigQuery, Dataflow, Vertex AI, Cloud Run, GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, or Azure equivalents.
• Demonstrated experience architecting clinical AI/ML platforms, including feature stores, model serving infrastructure, MLOps tooling, and LLM integration patterns applied to healthcare data.
• Strong command of distributed-systems design, including event streaming, asynchronous processing, API gateway patterns, service mesh, and fault-tolerant pipeline architecture.
• Experience defining and executing multi-year platform roadmaps across large, multi-squad engineering programs.
• Proven ability to influence and align senior technical and business stakeholders across portfolio and product boundaries without direct authority.
• Deep familiarity with clinical and healthcare data domains, including clinical notes, EHR data, claims, pharmacy, member, and provider data.
• Strong understanding of HIPAA, PHI handling requirements, clinical data privacy regulations, and enterprise security frameworks.
• Experience working in SAFe Agile, program increment planning, and large-scale Agile delivery.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

• Google Cloud Professional Architect, GCP Data Engineer, or Azure Solutions Architect certification.
• Hands-on experience with LLM-based clinical document processing, RAG architectures, OCR pipelines, or clinical NLP applicable to patient fact extraction and potential-conditions workflows.
• Experience designing and operating production ML platforms at scale using Vertex AI Pipelines, Kubeflow, MLflow, or equivalent.
• Familiarity with data mesh principles, domain-oriented data ownership, and federated governance.
• Background in real-time ML serving, A/B testing infrastructure, and model monitoring and drift detection in clinical AI contexts.
• Prior experience in health plan, healthcare delivery, or clinical operations environments; familiarity with clinical workflows and value-based care programs is a plus.
• Published thought leadership, conference presentations, or patents in AI/ML systems, clinical NLP, or healthcare data architecture.
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or equivalent advanced technical experience.

Responsibilities

• Drive the end-to-end software architecture vision and roadmap for the Clinical Insights Engine platform across GCP and Azure.
• Serve as the technical authority for system design and architecture decisions, providing guidance and governance across engineering squads and product teams.
• Lead design of scalable, fault-tolerant, and cost-optimized platforms for clinical AI/ML workloads, including LLM inference pipelines, large-scale document processing, and real-time clinical data services.
• Define and govern ML architecture patterns for feature stores, model registries, model serving, experiment tracking, and MLOps pipelines, with a focus on reproducibility, observability, and production reliability.
• Lead architecture for LLM-integrated systems, including prompt engineering frameworks, RAG pipelines, embedding stores, and clinical NLP processing.
• Define CIE-wide engineering standards, reference architectures, and platform patterns that promote consistency, reuse, and velocity.
• Define enterprise software standards, architecture patterns, and reference architectures for adoption across HCD and the broader CVS Health engineering community.
• Partner with CIE portfolio leads, product managers, and clinical stakeholders to align technical architecture with clinical program outcomes and business strategy.
• Represent CIE in enterprise architecture forums, HCD data governance councils, and cross-functional technical leadership groups.
• Champion engineering practices including event-driven design, API-first development, data quality at source, and self-service platform patterns.
• Identify and proactively address architectural risk, technical debt, and data quality issues across CIE's clinical data platform.
• Mentor senior engineers and architects across CIE squads and foster technical rigor, curiosity, and innovation.
• Ensure CIE systems meet HIPAA compliance, enterprise security standards, and clinical data governance requirements.

Benefits

• Medical coverage
• Dental coverage
• Vision coverage
• Paid time off
• Retirement savings options
• Wellness programs
• Other resources supporting colleagues' physical, emotional, and financial well-being, based on eligibility
• Eligibility for a CVS Health bonus, commission, or short-term incentive program
• An award target in the company's equity award program

What This Job Offers

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