Principal Architect - Cloud and Observability

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're hiring a Principal Architect to take ownership of how we do observability and hybrid cloud at CVS Health. This person will sit within our Enterprise Architecture organization and be responsible for the architecture, standards, and technical direction behind our observability platforms and our multi-cloud infrastructure posture.

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

Observability

• Own the enterprise observability reference architecture covering metrics, logs, traces, and events across all environments (cloud and on-prem).
• Drive the Open Telemetry-first instrumentation strategy -- standard libraries, semantic conventions, collector topologies (Daemon Set, gateway, sidecar), and pipeline design.
• Build and operate telemetry pipelines on Grafana Mimir, Loki, and Tempo, including multi-tenant configurations, retention policies, and capacity planning.
• Define how we measure reliability: SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and alerting frameworks -- consistently across all lines of business.
• Own the integration between observability tooling and incident management (Service Now ITOM, xMatters).

Drive telemetry schema standards to ensure teams emit data that is useful downstream, not just technically compliant.

Hybrid Multi-Cloud

• Build and maintain reference architectures for our hybrid footprint:
  Open Shift on-prem with KVM/libvirt and Dell Power Flex storage, plus Azure, AWS, and GCP.
• Lead standards work around workload identity and federation using SPIFFE/SPIRE and cloud-native IAM patterns to move away from static secrets.
• Provide guidance on compute runtime selection -- containers vs. VMs vs. bare metal vs. serverless -- with a clear decision framework for teams.
• Help teams connect autoscaling and capacity planning behavior to actual telemetry signals.

Push Fin Ops maturity forward by integrating cost data into the observability stack, establishing unit economics, and working toward open billing standards like FOCUS.

AI + Observability

• Identify where AI/ML adds practical value in our observability stack -- anomaly detection, root cause analysis, log clustering, and smarter alerting.
• Define observability standards for AI-powered systems (agents, RAG pipelines) -- covering latency, token costs, model drift, and related signals.

Ensure new AI-powered platforms are instrumented correctly from day one.

Architecture Community

• Participate in cross-functional architecture working groups focused on observability and hybrid cloud standards.
• Publish architecture decision records and reference implementations that teams can actually use.
• Mentor architects and platform engineers; conduct architecture reviews to raise the bar across the org.
• Work with security and compliance on HIPAA, SOX, and PCI requirements as they apply to telemetry and cloud infrastructure.

Represent CVS Health in vendor evaluations and stay connected to the open-source ecosystem (CNCF, Open Telemetry, Grafana Labs).

• 10+ years in infrastructure, cloud architecture, platform engineering, or SRE
• 8+ years of architecture work in observability, cloud infrastructure, or both at a large enterprise
• Solid experience with at least two of Azure, AWS, or GCP -- including networking, identity, compute, and storage
• 5+ years with Kubernetes in production (Open Shift, EKS, AKS, or GKE)
• 5+ years with Open Telemetry or similar frameworks (collectors, SDKs, semantic conventions, pipeline design)
• 5+ years with observability platforms:
  Grafana/Mimir/Loki/Tempo, Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace, or comparable tools
• Experience defining SLOs/SLIs and building alerting strategies at an organizational level
• Proven track record writing architecture standards that other…