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Position Summary
Aetna Technology is seeking a Principal Engineer, Architecture, AI & Enablement to serve as a strategic technical leader responsible for accelerating modernization, improving engineering effectiveness, enabling responsible AI adoption, and helping guide technology transformation across a complex enterprise technology portfolio.
This role operates at enterprise scale and serves as a key partner to Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, Platform Engineering, Security, Product, Infrastructure, and Delivery organizations. The successful candidate will help translate enterprise technology strategy into practical engineering execution by developing modernization roadmaps, establishing technology standards, promoting engineering best practices, and enabling adoption of emerging technologies.
The Principal Engineer will play a critical role in helping engineering teams modernize legacy systems, adopt cloud-native technologies, improve software delivery practices, and evaluate opportunities to leverage AI capabilities in a responsible and scalable manner. This individual will influence technical direction across multiple platforms and business domains while partnering closely with senior technology leaders to drive consistent and sustainable technology outcomes.
The ideal candidate combines deep software engineering and architecture expertise with experience leading large-scale modernization initiatives, cloud transformation efforts, engineering enablement programs, and enterprise-wide technology change.
This position can work remotely from anywhere in the continental USA.
Primary Responsibilities
Enterprise Technology Leadership
- Serve as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leaders, architects, product teams, and business stakeholders.
- Partner closely with Enterprise Architecture to translate enterprise technology standards into actionable engineering guidance and implementation patterns.
- Influence technology strategy, engineering practices, modernization priorities, and architectural decisions across multiple organizations.
- Drive alignment between long-term technology strategy and engineering execution.
- Promote consistent adoption of enterprise technology standards, architectural principles, and engineering best practices.
Modernization & Transformation
- Lead and support modernization initiatives across a diverse portfolio of enterprise applications, platforms, and services.
- Develop modernization roadmaps that support application transformation, cloud adoption, platform evolution, technology simplification, and operational improvement.
- Evaluate existing technology landscapes and define future-state architectures that improve scalability, resiliency, maintainability, and business agility.
- Guide engineering organizations through complex technology transformations while balancing business objectives, delivery commitments, and technical debt reduction.
- Identify opportunities to improve platform consistency, accelerate delivery, and increase engineering efficiency through reusable solutions and architectural patterns.
Architecture & Engineering Enablement
- Define and promote engineering standards, reference architectures, implementation frameworks, and reusable technology patterns.
- Partner with engineering teams to accelerate adoption of cloud-native, platform engineering, DevSecOps, and software engineering best practices.
- Participate in architecture reviews, technical design discussions, and governance forums.
- Guide engineering teams in evaluating technology options, architectural approaches, modernization strategies, and platform capabilities.
- Promote security, resiliency, observability, performance, maintainability, and operational excellence throughout the software development lifecycle.
AI Enablement & Emerging Technology Adoption
- Identify opportunities to leverage AI technologies to improve engineering productivity, delivery efficiency, automation, and operational effectiveness.
- Help establish governance frameworks, standards, and guardrails for responsible AI adoption.
- Partner with architecture, engineering, security, and compliance stakeholders to evaluate emerging AI technologies and implementation approaches.
- Provide technical leadership on AI-assisted software development, testing, automation, and engineering workflows.
- Guide technology adoption decisions by balancing innovation, business value, security, compliance, and operational considerations.
Technical Leadership & Collaboration
- Mentor senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders.
- Lead technical communities of practice and knowledge-sharing initiatives.
- Facilitate collaboration across engineering, architecture, platform, security, infrastructure, and product organizations.
- Influence technical direction through expertise, leadership, and partnership rather than organizational authority.
- Serve as a technical escalation point for complex architectural, modernization, and technology-related challenges.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, software architecture, platform engineering, or related technical leadership roles.
- 5+ years of experience leading large-scale technology modernization, transformation, cloud adoption, or enterprise architecture initiatives.
- Deep expertise in enterprise application architecture, software engineering practices, distributed systems, and modern software delivery methodologies.
- Experience partnering with architecture and engineering organizations to drive enterprise technology strategy and execution.
- Strong experience with cloud platforms, modern application architectures, and platform engineering concepts.
- Experience implementing DevSecOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, engineering automation, and developer productivity solutions.
- Experience evaluating and enabling AI-assisted engineering capabilities and emerging technology adoption.
- Demonstrated success influencing technical decisions across large organizations without direct management authority.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to engage engineering teams, architects, executive stakeholders, and business leaders.
- Experience mentoring senior technical contributors and technical leadership teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience within healthcare, health insurance, financial services, or other highly regulated industries.
- Experience modernizing complex legacy application portfolios and supporting enterprise technology transformation initiatives.
- Experience with cloud-native platforms, Kubernetes, OpenShift, containerization, infrastructure automation, and platform engineering practices.
- Experience establishing engineering standards, governance models, operating frameworks, and technology adoption strategies.
- Experience evaluating AI technologies including generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, model orchestration, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, monitoring, and human-in-the-loop controls.
- Experience with architecture decision records (ADRs), domain-driven design, event-driven architectures, APIs, microservices, and distributed systems.
- Experience developing internal engineering platforms, paved-road engineering patterns, or engineering enablement programs.
- Relevant cloud, architecture, Kubernetes, DevOps, security, or AI-related certifications.
Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field, or equivalent combination of education and practical experience.
- Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Business Technology, or a related discipline preferred.
Pay Range
The typical pay range for this role is:
$144,200.00 - $288,400.00
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.
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