Executive Director, Digital Engineering- Aetna Member Care and Journey Services

Executive Director, Digital Engineering
- Aetna Member Care and Journey Services

The Executive Director, Digital Engineering
- Aetna Member Care and Journey Services is a senior technology leader responsible for setting the technical vision, architectural direction, and engineering execution for member centric services.

This role leads large-scale engineering teams that build high-performance backend APIs, microservices, and cloud-native systems that power member experiences across digital, agent, provider, and partner channels. The leader ensures exceptional service stability, resiliency, innovation velocity, and alignment with enterprise user experience and operational goals.

• Backend API & Microservices Engineering Leadership
  • Lead the design, development, and delivery of scalable backend systems, APIs, and microservices powering member-facing capabilities.
  • Define API contract standards, and integration patterns used across Member Services platforms.
  • Drive service modernization by adopting cloud-native architectures, containerization, and event-driven patterns.
• Service Stability, Observability & Resiliency
  • Establish standards for availability, resiliency, performance, and disaster recovery across all services.
  • Implement SLO/SLI/error budget frameworks, health checks, and high-availability architectures.
  • Institutionalize strong observability practices using metrics, logs, traces, and distributed monitoring.
  • Drive continuous reliability improvements through chaos engineering, automated fault injection, and proactive root-cause analysis.
• AI-Driven Engineering & Automation
  • Drive the shift to an AI-native engineering organization — making AI-assisted development the default across design, code generation, review, testing, and operations — and build the tooling standards, enablement, and adoption targets that make it stick.
  • Build AI-powered product features for members — personalization, intelligent routing, and automated decisioning — partnering with product and data science to take them from experimentation into production, with the privacy, PHI-handling, and human-in-the-loop guardrails a regulated member population requires.
• API Integrations & Enterprise Interoperability
  • Own strategy for internal and external API integrations supporting member services and other enterprise systems.
  • Standardize integration patterns to ensure secure, performant, and consistent data exchange across domains.
  • Partner with product, security, architecture, and platform engineering to ensure scalable, compliant, and reusable integration solutions.
• Innovation & Technology Strategy
  • Drive technology exploration and rapid experimentation in areas such as LLM/AI augmentation, serverless compute, real-time data streaming, and next-gen integration frameworks.
  • Build and maintain a long-term roadmap for modernizing legacy components, platformizing capabilities, and increasing engineering velocity.
  • Champion engineering excellence and best practices across code quality, testing, automation, and release reliability.
• Leadership, Talent & Organizational Development
  • Build, lead, and mentor high-performing engineering teams across global locations.
  • Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous learning.
  • Define organizational structures, role expectations, and growth paths to develop future engineering leaders.

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in backend systems, distributed services, and API platforms.
• Proven experience leading large engineering organizations delivering mission-critical services.
• Strong background in AWS cloud platform, microservices architecture, CI/CD pipelines, and Dev Ops/SRE practices.
• Demonstrated success driving…