Principal Cloud Engineer

At CVS Health, we’re building a world of health around every consumer and surrounding ourselves with dedicated colleagues who are passionate about transforming health care.

As the nation’s leading health solutions company, we reach millions of Americans through our local presence, digital channels and more than 300,000 purpose-driven colleagues – caring for people where, when and how they choose in a way that is uniquely more connected, more convenient and more compassionate. And we do it all with heart, each and every day.

Position Summary:

CVS Health is recruiting for a Principal Engineer specializing in VMware, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Storage, and Compute platforms. In this high-impact role, you will lead the design and implementation of cutting-edge virtualization and container orchestration platforms that underpin our enterprise compute infrastructure. This role demands a systems thinker who thrives in large-scale hybrid environments, prioritizes platform reliability and operational excellence. The Principal Engineer needs to have a proven track record of building enterprise container and virtualization platforms from scratch. You'll help drive the execution of our hybrid infrastructure strategy spanning traditional virtualization and modern container orchestration while ensuring seamless workload migrations, automation at scale, and platform orchestration across VMware vSphere, Kubernetes, and OpenShift environments. The Principal Engineer will serve as a thought leader for platform engineering teams, ensuring our infrastructure approach is robust, innovative, and aligned with evolving business objectives.

You will make an impact by:

Strategic Platform Design & Build

• Drive the end-to-end designs for highly scalable, hybrid virtualization and container platforms (VMware vSphere, Kubernetes, OpenShift), ensuring alignment with business goals and operational requirements
• Partner with other Distinguished Engineers, Architects, and leadership to shape the long-term infrastructure modernization roadmap, with specific milestones for container adoption and hybrid cloud integrations
• Champion best practices for high-availability, performance, security, and cost optimization across virtualized and containerized workloads

Platform Development & Automation

• Oversee the design and development of new container-native platforms from the ground up, setting the standard for automation and infrastructure-as-code in large, complex enterprises
• Implement robust GitOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and automated deployment strategies for seamless scaling of containerized and virtualized services
• Foster an engineering culture that values platform reliability, developer productivity, and continuous operational improvement

Hybrid Infrastructure & Emerging Technologies

• Provide thought leadership on how modern containerization and traditional virtualization create complementary infrastructure paradigms, including workload placement strategies, resource optimization, and migration patterns
• Understand how to modernize legacy VMware workloads through containerization and Kubernetes adoption
• Evaluate, recommend, and build emerging platform technologies (e.g., service mesh, serverless containers, edge orchestration) and guide their integration into the broader technology stack

Cross-Functional Leadership & Mentoring

• Serve as a key technical resource, translating complex platform architectural decisions into clear business implications and cost-benefit analyses
• Perform as technical leader and support platform engineers, SREs, and operational teams, elevating the organization's overall infrastructure proficiency
• Cultivate a strong, collaborative culture across distributed teams, promoting open communication, knowledge sharing, and platform innovation

Enterprise Governance & Operations

• Ensure adherence to enterprise security standards and compliance requirements, advocating secure-by-design principles at every stage of the platform lifecycle
• Guide compliance with internal governance frameworks for identity and access management, network segmentation, and business continuity planning
• Identify operational risks and propose mitigation strategies in alignment with corporate security, compliance, and SLA requirements

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years experience in large-scale enterprise virtualization and container environments
• Experience in
  • VMware vSphere Platform: vCenter Server, ESXi hypervisor, vSAN storage, NSX-T networking, vRealize Suite (Automation, Operations, Log Insight), and vSphere with Tanzu integration
  • Kubernetes Core Technologies: Container runtimes (containerd, CRI-O), CNI plugins (Calico, Cilium, Flannel), CSI storage drivers, and custom resource definitions (CRDs) with operators
  • OpenShift Platform: OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, OpenShift GitOps (ArgoCD), and OpenShift Pipelines (Tekton)
  • OpenShift Virtualization (CNV): KubeVirt integration, VM lifecycle management, live migration capabilities, virtctl CLI operations, DataVolumes and CDI (Containerized Data Importer), VM templates and golden images, SR-IOV and GPU passthrough, and hybrid workload orchestration mixing VMs and containers on the same platform
  • Container Orchestration: Multi-cluster management, cluster autoscaling, workload scheduling, resource quotas, and cross-cluster networking with service mesh (Istio, Linkerd)
  • Infrastructure Automation: Terraform/Terragrunt for infrastructure provisioning, Ansible for configuration management, Helm charts, and Kustomize for application deployment
  • CI/CD & GitOps: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Flux, and automated testing frameworks for infrastructure and application pipelines
  • Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, and VMware vRealize Operations for comprehensive platform monitoring
  • Storage & Networking: VMware vSAN, Kubernetes persistent volumes, software-defined networking (SDN), load balancers (HAProxy, NGINX), and ingress controllers
  • Security & Compliance: Pod Security Standards, NetworkPolicies, RBAC implementation, certificate management (cert-manager), and vulnerability scanning (Twistlock, Aqua Security)
  • Backup & Disaster Recovery: Velero for Kubernetes backups, VMware vSphere Replication, and cross-platform disaster recovery strategies
  • IaaS Platform Development: Ground-up design of Infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms including multi-tenant resource provisioning APIs, self-service portals with quota management, automated infrastructure lifecycle (provision/scale/terminate), chargeback and metering systems, resource scheduling algorithms, template catalogs and golden image management, network automation (VLAN/VXLAN provisioning), storage orchestration (block/file/object), identity federation (LDAP/AD/SAML integration), and comprehensive audit logging with compliance reporting

Preferred Qualifications:

• Problem-solving mindset
  • Ability to design and build resilient hybrid platforms and deliver pragmatic infrastructure solutions
• Leadership
  • Track record of driving cross-functional alignment in complex infrastructure initiatives

Education: 

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience (Highschool diploma plus 4 years relevant work experience)

Pay Range

The typical pay range for this role is:

$144,200.00 - $288,400.00

This pay range represents the base hourly rate or base annual full-time salary for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls.  The actual base salary offer will depend on a variety of factors including experience, education, geography and other relevant factors.  This position is eligible for a CVS Health bonus, commission or short-term incentive program in addition to the base pay range listed above.  This position also includes an award target in the company’s equity award program. 
 

Our people fuel our future. Our teams reflect the customers, patients, members and communities we serve and we are committed to fostering a workplace where every colleague feels valued and that they belong.

Great benefits for great people

We take pride in our comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits – investing in the physical, emotional and financial wellness of our colleagues and their families to help them be the healthiest they can be. In addition to our competitive wages, our great benefits include:

• Affordable medical plan options, a 401(k) plan (including matching company contributions), and an employee stock purchase plan.

• No-cost programs for all colleagues including wellness screenings, tobacco cessation and weight management programs, confidential counseling and financial coaching.

• Benefit solutions that address the different needs and preferences of our colleagues including paid time off, flexible work schedules, family leave, dependent care resources, colleague assistance programs, tuition assistance, retiree medical access and many other benefits depending on eligibility.

For more information, visit https://jobs.cvshealth.com/us/en/benefits

We anticipate the application window for this opening will close on: 01/01/2026

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state and local laws.