Lead Observability Platform Engineer

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

Join CVS Health Enterprise Technology and help evolve observability at Fortune‑6 scale. The Enterprise Observability Platform (EOP) delivers standardized, frictionless instrumentation and telemetry pipelines for engineering teams across all CVS Health application environments—spanning on‑prem, hybrid, and multiple public clouds.

As a Lead Observability Platform Engineer, you will design, build, and operate large‑scale observability services that process billions of logs, metrics, and traces daily. You will develop high‑performance backend services using Go, Java, and Node.js, and lead the adoption of OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation and standards across the enterprise.

In this role, you will partner closely with SRE, Cloud Engineering, CI/CD, Infrastructure, Security, and application teams to shape platform strategy, enhance developer experience, and ensure reliable, secure, and cost‑efficient observability at scale. You will provide senior technical leadership, influence architectural direction, and help deliver a world‑class, self-service observability ecosystem that accelerates engineering productivity and operational excellence.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design, build, and operate core observability platform services using Go, Java (Spring Boot), and Node.js.
• Lead enterprise-wide adoption of OpenTelemetry, including client libraries, semantic conventions, instrumentation patterns, and Collector/agent strategy.
• Architect and scale high‑throughput, fault‑tolerant telemetry pipelines (logs, metrics, traces) with a focus on performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Develop self-service observability capabilities that simplify onboarding, troubleshooting, and adoption for application teams.
• Implement end-to-end monitoring of the observability platform itself, defining SLOs, health checks, and alerting.
• Collaborate with SRE, Platform, and Cloud teams to establish reliability standards, error budgets, and incident response practices.
• Participate in on‑call rotations and lead incident mitigation, root‑cause analysis, and post‑incident reviews.
• Automate operational workflows and eliminate manual toil through tooling, CI/CD enhancements, and platform automation.
• Ensure secure telemetry pipelines through mTLS, secrets management, and zero‑trust design patterns.
• Produce and maintain high-quality technical documentation, standards, and best practices.
• Engage with internal engineering teams to gather requirements, influence roadmap prioritization, and deliver platform improvements.
• Provide technical leadership through mentorship, design reviews, architectural guidance, and cross‑team collaboration with principal engineers and engineering leadership.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 7+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Platform Engineering, or SRE.
• 5+ years of experience with observability practices, including SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, alerting, and incident management.
• 5+ years building production-grade backend services in Go and/or Java.
• 5+ years implementing and operating OpenTelemetry, including OTLP, semantic conventions, and instrumentation patterns.
• 5+ years with cloud-native and containerized platforms (Docker, Kubernetes, Argo CD).
• 5+ years working with public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• 3+ years designing and scaling distributed, high‑volume data pipelines.
• 3+ years working with Grafana OSS or comparable observability backends (e.g., Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir).
• 3+ years with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL).

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with service meshes and networking technologies such as Envoy and Istio
• Experience integrating or operating commercial observability platforms (Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, etc.)
• Experience with streaming and data platforms such as Kafka, Pulsar, or similar technologies
• Familiarity with time-series, NoSQL, or analytical databases (ClickHouse, Bigtable, Cassandra, etc.)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation
• Experience with cost optimization and capacity planning for large-scale telemetry systems
• Experience with chaos engineering, resiliency testing, or fault injection
• Background in security‑aware platform design, including secure service‑to‑service communication
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing platform standards across organizations
• Strong operational experience supporting 24x7 production systems, including on‑call responsibilities
• Strong technical communication and cross‑team collaboration skills
• Experience operating in regulated or compliance‑heavy environments (e.g., healthcare, finance)

EDUCATION

Bachelor’s degree from accredited university or equivalent work experience (HS diploma + 4 years relevant experience).

BUSINESS OVERVIEW

Bring your heart to CVS Health Every one of us at CVS Health shares a single, clear purpose: Bringing our heart to every moment of your health. This purpose guides our commitment to deliver enhanced human-centric health care for a rapidly changing world. Anchored in our brand — with heart at its center — our purpose sends a personal message that how we deliver our services is just as important as what we deliver.  Our Heart At Work Behaviors™ support this purpose. We want everyone who works at CVS Health to feel empowered by the role they play in transforming our culture and accelerating our ability to innovate and deliver solutions to make health care more personal, convenient and affordable.  We strive to promote and sustain a culture of diversity, inclusion and belonging every day.  CVS Health is an affirmative action employer, and is an equal opportunity employer, as are the physician-owned businesses for which CVS Health provides management services. We do not discriminate in recruiting, hiring, promotion, or any other personnel action based on race, ethnicity, color, national origin, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.  We proudly support and encourage people with military experience (active, veterans, reservists and National Guard) as well as military spouses to apply for CVS Health job opportunities.

Pay Range

The typical pay range for this role is:

$106,605.00 - $284,280.00

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: 04/30/2026

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

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