Position Summary

The Executive Director, Digital Engineering- Aetna Member Care and Journey Services is a senior technology leader responsible for setting the technical vision, architectural direction, and engineering execution for member centric services.

This role leads large-scale engineering teams that build high-performance backend APIs, microservices, and cloud-native systems that power member experiences across digital, agent, provider, and partner channels.

The leader ensures exceptional service stability, resiliency, innovation velocity, and alignment with enterprise user experience and operational goals.

Key Responsibilities

1. Backend API & Microservices Engineering Leadership

• Lead the design, development, and delivery of scalable backend systems, APIs, and microservices powering member-facing capabilities.

• Define API contract standards, and integration patterns used across Member Services platforms.

• Drive service modernization by adopting cloud-native architectures, containerization, and event-driven patterns.

2. Service Stability, Observability & Resiliency

• Establish standards for availability, resiliency, performance, and disaster recovery across all services.

• Implement SLO/SLI/error budget frameworks, health checks, and high-availability architectures.

• Institutionalize strong observability practices using metrics, logs, traces, and distributed monitoring.

• Drive continuous reliability improvements through chaos engineering, automated fault injection, and proactive root-cause analysis.

3. AI-Driven Engineering & Automation

Drive the shift to an AI-native engineering organization - making AI-assisted development the default across design, code generation, review, testing, and operations - and build the tooling standards, enablement, and adoption targets that make it stick.

Build AI-powered product features for members - personalization, intelligent routing, and automated decisioning - partnering with product and data science to take them from experimentation into production, with the privacy, PHI-handling, and human-in-the-loop guardrails a regulated member population requires.

4. API Integrations & Enterprise Interoperability

• Own strategy for internal and external API integrations supporting member services and other enterprise systems.

• Standardize integration patterns to ensure secure, performant, and consistent data exchange across domains.

• Partner with product, security, architecture, and platform engineering to ensure scalable, compliant, and reusable integration solutions.

5. Innovation & Technology Strategy

• Drive technology exploration and rapid experimentation in areas such as LLM/AI augmentation, serverless compute, real-time data streaming, and next-gen integration frameworks.

• Build and maintain a long-term roadmap for modernizing legacy components, platformizing capabilities, and increasing engineering velocity.

• Champion engineering excellence and best practices across code quality, testing, automation, and release reliability.

6. Leadership, Talent & Organizational Development

• Build, lead, and mentor high-performing engineering teams across global locations.

• Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous learning.

• Define organizational structures, role expectations, and growth paths to develop future engineering leaders.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in backend systems, distributed services, and API platforms.

• Proven experience leading large engineering organizations delivering mission-critical services.

• Strong background in AWS cloud platform, microservices architecture, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps/SRE practices.

• Demonstrated success driving stability, resiliency, and observability improvements at scale.

• Experience leveraging AI, LLM-based engineering and operational tooling.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in regulated industries (healthcare, financial services, insurance).

• Background in building member, patient, or consumer-facing digital experiences.

• Executive-level communication and strategic influence across complex organizations.

This leader will be required to work out of or travel to Hartford, CT.

Education
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Master's degree preferred.

Pay Range

The typical pay range for this role is:

$175,100.00 - $334,750.00

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.

Great benefits for great people

We take pride in offering a comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits that reflects our commitment to our colleagues and their families.

This full-time position is eligible for a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the physical, emotional, and financial well-being of colleagues and their families. The benefits for this position include medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, retirement savings options, wellness programs, and other resources, based on eligibility.

Additional details about available benefits are provided during the application process and on Benefits Moments.

We anticipate the application window for this opening will close on: 12/31/2026