Principal Architect - Cloud Native

Job Title: Principal Architect - Cloud Native

Job Location: Work at Home, Illinois, United States

Job Location Type: Remote

Job Contract Type: Full time
Job Seniority Level:

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

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.

We run workloads across on-prem private cloud (OpenShift, KVM, Dell PowerFlex), Azure, AWS, and GCP. We need someone who can build and maintain the reference architectures, telemetry standards, and instrumentation patterns that let our engineering teams monitor all of that consistently. We've committed to an OpenTelemetry-first approach and use the Grafana stack (Mimir, Loki, Tempo) as our primary backends, but we also operate Datadog, Splunk, and Dynatrace in various parts of the org.

On the cloud side, there is real work to do around workload identity, runtime selection, autoscaling guidance, and FinOps. Teams are asking for concrete standards they can follow.

This is a hands-on role. You'll write architecture docs, build proof-of-concepts, configure OTel pipelines, and present to leadership.

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

Observability

- Own the enterprise observability reference architecture covering metrics, logs, traces, and events across all environments (cloud and on-prem).

- Drive the OpenTelemetry-first instrumentation strategy -- standard libraries, semantic conventions, collector topologies (DaemonSet, 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 (ServiceNow 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: OpenShift on-prem with KVM/libvirt and Dell PowerFlex 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 FinOps 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 observabilit