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# Lead Director of Software Engineering

- **Company:** CVS Health
- **Location:** Sacramento, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $144,200.0 - $288,400.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Engineering, Distributed Systems, Machine Learning, Open Source Technology, Software Engineering, Data Processing, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Large Language Models, Prompt Engineering, AI Platforms, Information Technology, Microservices
- **Published:** October 18, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.juju.com/job/1_cvs2-R1026500

## About the Role

You hold your teams to the same standard. + **Partner at the executive level** - with Product owners, Data Engineers, and Health care business leaders - translating business strategy into engineering bets with precision and conviction. + **Be the technical voice in the room** You call out architectural debt, push back on infeasible timelines, and advocate for the right engineering investment. **Required Qualifications** + **10+ years of progressive software engineering experience** , including 5+ years leading large-scale engineering organizations.
You have built and scaled systems that serve tens of thousands of users.
You know what happens when your system goes down. + **Deep, hands-on technical foundation** in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and modern backend engineering at scale. + **Proven AI platform ownership.** You have deployed production AI systems - not POCs, not demos, not limited to prompt engineering.
You understand model deployment pipelines, vector databases, RAG architectures, LLM orchestration, inference optimization, and responsible AI principles. + **Track record of engineering transformation.** You have migrated monoliths to microservices, modernized legacy platforms under real business pressure, and lived the consequences of every architectural decision you've made. **Preferred Qualifications** + **Healthcare or highly regulated domain experience** - You have navigated HIPAA, CMS compliance, PHI data handling development. + **Platform engineering ownership** - You have built or led internal developer platforms, engineering productivity tooling. **Education** + **Bachelor's degree** in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or a closely related technical discipline - _or_ equivalent demonstrated engineering depth through work history, open source portfolio, or verifiable technical contribution at scale. **Preferred** + **Master's degree (M.S.
or M.Eng.)** in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, or a related quantitative field.

## Description

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.
We're looking for a Lead Director of Software Engineering who thinks like a founder, executes like a principal engineer, and leads like someone who's done it at the highest levels of the industry.
You will set the bar - and then raise it.
What You'll Actually Do + **Drive technical strategy** across a multi-team engineering organization (50-150+ engineers), setting architectural standards, defining engineering excellence benchmarks, and personally reviewing and elevating the work. + **Operational Efficiency.** Every system design decision you make should start with the question: _How to create10x leverage?_ You will actively embed LLMs, generative AI, agentic workflows, and ML-powered automation into the engineering lifecycle, not just as experiments, but as production-grade differentiators. + **Own delivery at velocity.** You ship.
You are accountable for outcomes, not roadmaps.