Principal Cloud Engineer

At CVS Health, we’re building a world of health around every consumer and surrounding ourselves with dedicated colleagues who are passionate about transforming health care.

As the nation’s leading health solutions company, we reach millions of Americans through our local presence, digital channels and more than 300,000 purpose-driven colleagues – caring for people where, when and how they choose in a way that is uniquely more connected, more convenient and more compassionate. And we do it all with heart, each and every day.

Position Summary:

CVS Health is recruiting for a Principal Engineer specializing in VMware, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Storage, and Compute platforms. In this high-impact role, you will lead the design and implementation of cutting-edge virtualization and container orchestration platforms that underpin our enterprise compute infrastructure. This role demands a systems thinker who thrives in large-scale hybrid environments, prioritizes platform reliability and operational excellence. The Principal Engineer needs to have a proven track record of building enterprise container and virtualization platforms from scratch. You'll help drive the execution of our hybrid infrastructure strategy spanning traditional virtualization and modern container orchestration while ensuring seamless workload migrations, automation at scale, and platform orchestration across VMware vSphere, Kubernetes, and OpenShift environments. The Principal Engineer will serve as a thought leader for platform engineering teams, ensuring our infrastructure approach is robust, innovative, and aligned with evolving business objectives.

You will make an impact by:

Strategic Platform Design & Build

• Drive the end-to-end designs for highly scalable, hybrid virtualization and container platforms (VMware vSphere, Kubernetes, OpenShift), ensuring alignment with business goals and operational requirements
• Partner with other Distinguished Engineers, Architects, and leadership to shape the long-term infrastructure modernization roadmap, with specific milestones for container adoption and hybrid cloud integrations
• Champion best practices for high-availability, performance, security, and cost optimization across virtualized and containerized workloads

Platform Development & Automation

• Oversee the design and development of new container-native platforms from the ground up, setting the standard for automation and infrastructure-as-code in large, complex enterprises
• Implement robust GitOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and automated deployment strategies for seamless scaling of containerized and virtualized services
• Foster an engineering culture that values platform reliability, developer productivity, and continuous operational improvement

Hybrid Infrastructure & Emerging Technologies

• Provide thought leadership on how modern containerization and traditional virtualization create complementary infrastructure paradigms, including workload placement strategies, resource optimization, and migration patterns
• Understand how to modernize legacy VMware workloads through containerization and Kubernetes adoption
• Evaluate, recommend, and build emerging platform technologies (e.g., service mesh, serverless containers, edge orchestration) and guide their integration into the broader technology stack

Cross-Functional Leadership & Mentoring

• Serve as a key technical resource, translating complex platform architectural decisions into clear business implications and cost-benefit analyses
• Perform as technical leader and support platform engineers, SREs, and operational teams, elevating the organization's overall infrastructure proficiency
• Cultivate a strong, collaborative culture across distributed teams, promoting open communication, knowledge sharing, and platform innovation

Enterprise Governance & Operations

• Ensure adherence to enterprise security standards and compliance requirements, advocating secure-by-design principles at every stage of the platform lifecycle
• Guide compliance with internal governance frameworks for identity and access management, network segmentation, and business continuity planning
• Identify operational risks and propose mitigation strategies in alignment with corporate security, compliance, and SLA requirements

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years experience in large-scale enterprise virtualization and container environments
• Experience in
  • VMware vSphere Platform: vCenter Server, ESXi hypervisor, vSAN storage, NSX-T networking, vRealize Suite (Automation, Operations, Log Insight), and vSphere with Tanzu integration
  • Kubernetes Core