Lead Director, AI/ML Solutions Engineering & Delivery

CVS Health is dedicated to building a world of health around every individual and is seeking a Lead Director for AI/ML Solutions Engineering & Delivery. This role involves leading an engineering and delivery organization to develop AI/ML solutions and platforms, ensuring quality and scalability while collaborating with various stakeholders across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Define and operationalize engineering standards for AI/ML-native applications, including secure-by-design patterns, dependency management, testing strategies, and documentation
• Lead architecture and design reviews for high-impact initiatives; identify risks across security, privacy, resiliency, data quality, cost, and compliance, and drive mitigation plans
• Design and evolve agentic AI systems that support real-time and batch workloads, high-throughput inference, low-latency APIs, and multi-tenant enterprise usage
• Drive platform-level architecture decisions across multi-cloud and on-prem environments, including GPU/accelerator strategy, Kubernetes orchestration, networking, storage, and identity
• Partner with intake, governance, product, operations, security, and engineering stakeholders to shape proposals and business cases; translate objectives into executable technical roadmaps
• Rapidly build and validate proofs of concept with clear success criteria (OKRs, KPIs) in collaboration with stakeholders
• Scale validated solutions into production-grade platforms and reusable products using CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and cost controls, enabling broad adoption through standard components and tooling
• Mentor senior and staff engineers; elevate engineering quality through coaching, reusable design patterns, and onboarding materials
• Develop internal developer playbooks, templates, and golden paths to accelerate delivery while ensuring compliance with enterprise standards
• Serve as a technical liaison across AI/ML teams at CVS Health to promote reuse, interoperability, and consistent practices
• Recruit, retain, and develop high-performing technical product managers, engineering managers, and senior engineers; establish clear career paths and a culture of continuous learning
• Own delivery proposals, project estimates, budgets, chargeback models, and vendor relationships, ensuring value, performance, and compliance
• Establish operating rhythms, delivery metrics, and transparent reporting for execution health, product quality, and cost management
• Enforce strong project management and agile practices across all delivery cycles
• Collaborate effectively across a matrixed organization and geographically dispersed virtual teams

Requirements:

• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience, including enterprise platforms and distributed systems
• 5+ years delivering AI/ML-enabled systems (including GenAI and Agentic AI) to production with strong reliability, security, and governance
• 10+ years leading large-scale initiatives across multiple teams in regulated or high-compliance environments
• 10+ years of experience with IT operations, cybersecurity standards, and best operational practices
• 5+ years designing scalable, resilient AI solutions, including APIs, event-driven systems, data pipelines, and multi-tenant architectures
• 5+ years of experience with agentic AI system lifecycle practices, including CI/CD, evaluation, monitoring, drift detection, and rollback
• 10+ years of experience with modern cloud platforms, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and secure software supply chain practices
• 5+ years building AI-enabled applications using LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector stores, and tool/function calling, including designing evaluation frameworks and safety guardrails (e.g., GCP Vertex AI, Azure Foundry, Anthropic Claude Agents)
• Bachelor's degree from accredited university or equivalent work experience (HS diploma + 4 years relevant experience)
• Acts as a trusted advisor, providing expert guidance within a technical specialization to enhance the effectiveness of complex initiatives
• Experience advising on scaling AI/ML platforms and ensuring adherence to technical strategies, standards, and policies
• Strong technical acumen with the ability to apply deep knowledge of specific technologies to practical solutions
• Demonstrated thought leadership and awareness of emerging AI/ML industry trends and best practices
• Strong presentation skills, including the ability to create clear, compelling executive-level materials and communicate effectively with diverse stakeholders
• Excellent communication skills, translating complex tradeoffs into clear recommendations and executable plans
• Proven program and project management experience leading multiple initiatives in parallel