Principal Cloud Architect

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 The Principal Cloud Architect is the senior individual contributor accountable for cloud architecture across Aetna Technology. This role sets the technical direction for how workloads are designed, placed, secured, and operated on AWS as the primary platform, with GCP and Azure supported where business context requires. The Principal Cloud Architect defines reference architectures and the paved road that engineering teams build on, resolves the hardest cross-cutting design problems, and serves as Aetna Technology's deepest technical authority on cloud - driving outcomes through design authority and influence rather than direct reports.

This role can work remotely from anywhere in the continental USA.

• Cloud Architecture and Reference Design Own the Aetna Technology cloud reference architectures - landing zones, account/subscription structure, networking, identity, and workload patterns - with AWS as primary and GCP/Azure supported by exception. Set the multicloud position: define which workloads run where and why, and the criteria that govern placement rather than defaulting to team preference. Design and maintain the paved road - the golden patterns, modules, and guardrails that let teams ship fast without re‑solving solved problems.
  
  Serve as the escalation point for the hardest cloud design decisions across the portfolio, going deep with engineering teams when needed.
• Security, Resilience, and Cost Embed zero-trust, identity, and network segmentation patterns into reference architectures so security is inherited by default, not bolted on per team. Define resilience and workload-placement standards - availability targets, failure isolation, and blast-radius reduction for business-critical systems. Own cloud cost architecture: bring Fin Ops discipline into design decisions so cost is a first-class constraint, and surface the cost implications of architectural choices in concrete dollar terms.
• AI/ML Platform Infrastructure Provide the cloud architecture underpinning Aetna Technology AI capabilities - compute, data access, model serving, and multi-model orchestration patterns. Partner with AI platform teams on the infrastructure and guardrails required to run AI workloads securely and cost-effectively at scale.
• Standards, Governance, and Enablement Author the cloud standards enforced as automated gates and paved-road defaults, not as a review queue. Contribute to architecture governance - reference architectures, technology radar input, and design reviews - in partnership with Enterprise Architecture. Evaluate emerging cloud-native services across all three providers and make directional recommendations on adoption.
• Technical Influence Translate cloud architecture trade-offs into clear, decision-oriented narratives for senior technology leaders and peer architects. Coach and raise the bar for Solution Architects and senior engineers through design reviews and system-level reasoning - without direct reporting relationships. Act as a credible technical partner to strategic cloud vendors and internal platform teams.

• 12+ years in technology, with deep, hands-on cloud architecture experience at Aetna Technology scale.
• Expert-level AWS architecture (compute, networking, identity, data, security);…