Executive Director, Data Protection & Privacy

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 are seeking a highly experienced and strategic Executive Director of Data Protection and Privacy to own and mature the enterprise data protection program. This role is accountable for the strategy, design, and operational execution of data loss prevention (DLP), data discovery and classification, data privacy engineering, and the broader set of controls that safeguard sensitive, regulated, and member data across the enterprise.

The successful candidate will bring deep technical fluency in data security architecture alongside the executive presence to engage senior leadership, legal, compliance, and business stakeholders on data risk. This is a highly visible leadership role responsible for reducing the organization's data exposure risk, ensuring regulatory alignment, and building a scalable, defensible data protection program in a large, complex, highly regulated healthcare environment.

• Data Protection Strategy: Define and drive the enterprise Data Protection and Privacy strategy, roadmap, and multi-year investment plan, aligning with business, legal, and regulatory priorities.
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Own the design, deployment, and continuous tuning of enterprise DLP controls across endpoint, network, email, cloud, and SaaS channels to prevent unauthorized exfiltration of sensitive data.
• Data Discovery: Lead enterprise-wide data discovery efforts to identify, inventory, and map sensitive and regulated data across structured, unstructured, and cloud data stores.
• Data Classification: Establish and operationalize data classification standards, taxonomy, and labeling schemes, ensuring consistent application across systems, applications, and third-party platforms.
• Data Privacy Engineering: Partner with engineering and application teams to embed privacy-by-design and privacy-enhancing technologies (encryption, tokenization, masking, anonymization, differential privacy) directly into data pipelines, platforms, and AI/ML workflows.
• Regulatory & Compliance Alignment: Ensure the data protection program aligns with HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, and other applicable state and federal privacy regulations; partner with Legal and Compliance on data subject requests, breach notification obligations, and audits.
• Insider Risk & Incident Response: Partner with Detection Engineering and Incident Response to build and refine use cases for detecting data exfiltration, insider risk, and unauthorized data movement; lead data-related incident response and forensics as needed.
• Governance & Reporting: Establish metrics, KPIs, and executive reporting to measure the maturity and effectiveness of the data protection program; present regularly to senior leadership and risk committees (e.g., GRC Steer Co).
• Team Leadership: Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing team of data protection and privacy engineers and analysts; foster a culture of technical excellence and business partnership.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Serve as a trusted advisor to executive leadership, Legal, Internal Audit, and business unit stakeholders on emerging data risks, including risks introduced by generative AI and new data platforms.
• Continuous Improvement: Stay current on emerging data protection technologies, privacy regulations, and industry threats; continuously evolve…