AI Staff Engineer

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:
CVS Health is seeking a highly technical, self-directed AI Staff Engineer to lead the design and development of agentic AI-powered search experiences across Aetna’s digital platforms (web and mobile).

This AI Staff Engineer sits at the intersection of AI architecture, platform engineering, and domain integration, enabling intelligent search capabilities across healthcare, pharmacy, and insurance experiences.

As a pure individual contributor at the staff level, you will own end-to-end solutioning and execution - from problem framing through architecture design and implementation. You will operate in a highly autonomous environment with evolving product structure, requiring strong judgment, technical depth, and the ability to translate ambiguity into scalable solutions.

A successful candidate demonstrates deep engineering expertise, the ability to independently design and deliver complex production-grade AI-driven systems, and a proactive approach to unblocking technical and organizational challenges.

Key Responsibilities:
Agentic AI Architecture & Design

• Design and evolve agentic search systems, including orchestration layers and domain-specific sub-agents. Make architectural decisions on when to introduce new agents versus extending existing capabilities, balancing scalability, performance, and maintainability

End-to-End Solution Ownership 

• Independently translate loosely defined product needs into clear technical solutions, architecture designs, and implementation plans. Design, build, and deliver complex features in the search platform with production-quality standards

Hands-On Development

• Actively write and own production code for core platform components, setting the standard for quality, scalability, and maintainability across the system

Operate in Ambiguity

• Work with product and stakeholders to shape and define requirements where they are unclear, establishing scope, success criteria, and delivery plans in an evolving product environment

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Partner with product and domain teams (e.g., benefits, pharmacy, provider) to integrate search capabilities, ensure correctness and relevance of results, and align platform capabilities with business needs

Technical Decision-Making & Tradeoffs

• Make informed decisions across system design, agent composition, latency vs. accuracy tradeoffs, and domain ownership boundaries

Pragmatic System Design

• Apply strong engineering judgment to avoid over-engineering agentic solutions, favoring pragmatic designs that balance complexity, performance, and maintainability

Problem Solving & Unblocking

• Proactively identify and resolve technical and organizational challenges

Required Qualifications:

• 7+ years of experience in large-scale software development and distributed systems
• 3+ years of experience designing and building production-grade AI-driven systems, including agentic or orchestration-based architectures
• 3+ years of hands-on programming expertise (Python and/or backend technologies) with production-level system ownership

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in healthcare, insurance, or pharmacy domains, with familiarity in member-facing digital platforms
• Experience designing or working with: AI-powered search systems (semantic search, retrieval, ranking) and LLM-based orchestration and multi-agent systems
• Experience designing systems with complex business logic and domain ownership boundaries
• Experience with authentication and secure system design in regulated environments
• Strong communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Ability to develop clear technical designs, solution briefs, and architecture documentation

Education:

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

Pay Range

The typical pay range for this role is:

This pay range represents the base hourly rate or base annual full-time salary for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls.  The actual base salary offer will depend on a variety of factors including experience, education, geography and other relevant factors.  This position is eligible for a CVS Health bonus, commission or short-term incentive program in addition to the base pay range listed above.  This position also includes an award target in the company’s equity award program. 
 

Our people fuel our future. Our teams reflect the customers, patients, members and communities we serve and we are committed to fostering a workplace where every colleague feels valued and that they belong.

Great benefits for great people

We take pride in offering a comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits that reflects our commitment to our colleagues and their families.

Additional details about available benefits are provided during the application process and on Benefits Moments.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state and local laws.