Principal Engineer API Platform

About this role

Job Title: Principal Engineer API Platform Job Location: Work at Home, Minnesota, United States Job Location Type: Remote Job Contract Type: Full time Job Seniority Level: 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. About the Role At CVS Health, we are building a developer platform that sets the standard for how hundreds of engineers across Retail, Pharmacy, Health Solutions, and Aetna design, build, secure, and publish APIs. Our platform spans an internal and external developer portal, an API catalog that drives discovery and prevents duplication across the enterprise, and the systems responsible for delivering APIs, agent-to-agent integrations, and MCP servers to both cloud and on-premises gateways. As a Principal Engineer on this platform, you will own the technical direction and architecture across several teams building these capabilities. This is a senior, cross-cutting role with significant organizational influence. You will establish the engineering practices that teams build on, define how APIs are designed and governed at scale, and lead the effort to embed AI-powered capabilities into the developer experience itself, from intelligent coding assistance that guides engineers toward compliant API patterns to MCP servers that make the enterprise API catalog available as a live, queryable context for AI-enabled workflows. This is a rare opportunity to shape the developer experience for a Fortune 6 company from the ground up, working with a high level of autonomy and leaving a long-term imprint on how CVS engineers build and deliver software. What We Expect of You API Design, Architecture & Governance

You are a recognized authority on API design, able to define and enforce standards for REST, GraphQL, event-driven, and MCP-based interfaces across the enterprise

You understand API lifecycle management from specification and contract-first design through versioning, deprecation, and eventual retirement

You can architect systems for delivering APIs and integrations to multi-environment targets, including public cloud (GCP, AWS, Azure) and on-premises gateways

You have deep experience with API gateway technologies, service mesh, and the infrastructure concerns that underpin reliable, high-throughput API delivery

You understand what it takes to build and operate an API catalog at enterprise scale, including taxonomy, discoverability, and ownership models

Security & Compliance

You approach API security as a first-class architectural concern, with hands-on expertise in OAuth 2.0, OIDC, mTLS, scopes, rate limiting, and threat modeling for APIs

You can define and operationalize secure-by-default patterns that developers on the platform pick up naturally, without having to become security experts themselves

You understand the regulatory and compliance landscape relevant to healthcare APIs (HIPAA, FHIR, CMS interoperability rules) and can translate those requirements into platform guardrails

You are comfortable working directly with security architecture teams to validate designs and respond to findings

AI-Powered Developer Experience

You will lead the design and delivery of AI capabilities embedded into the developer platform, including AI-powered coding skills and assistants that guide engineers toward CVS-compliant API patterns at the point of development

You will architect and build MCP servers that expose the enterprise API catalog as a queryable, real-time context, enabling AI agents and developer tools to surface relevant APIs, usage examples, ownership information, and compliance status during development workflows.

You understand how to prompt, instrument, and evaluate large language models in production contexts, and you know when AI is the right tool and when it is not

You will define the strategy for how AI tooling integrates with the portal, catalog, and gateway delivery pipeline, and you will work with engineering teams across CVS to drive adoption

Technical Leadership & Platform Thinking

You are a servant leader who can articulate a clear technical vision, rally engineers across multiple teams around it, and then stay close enough to execution to keep quality high.

You actively participate in architecture reviews, design documents, and pull requests, providing feedback that improves both the immediate work and the long-term thinking of the engineers you work with.

You think in platforms, not features: you design for extensibility, self-service, and the needs of teams you have never spoken to.

You are data-driven in how you measure platform health, developer adoption, and the impact of the APIs your platform delivers, and you can communicate that value clearly to engineering and business leadership.

You understand the importance of mentorship and invest genuinely in growing the engineers around you, particularly those earlier in their careers.

You will partner with product managers, architects, and program leaders to maintain a coherent strategy and roadmap across the platform.

Engineering Craft

You write clean, well-tested, production-grade code in JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, React) and Java/Spring Boot, and you hold the teams you work with to the same standard

You champion mature CI/CD practices, including automated testing, contract testing for APIs, and safe deployment strategies across cloud and on-premises targets

You have a strong grasp of observability, and you know how to make distributed API systems understandable through structured logging, distributed tracing, and meaningful metrics

You stay current with emerging technologies and can evaluate…