Your Aetna Virtual Assistant (YAVA) Engineering team is looking for a Staff Software Development Engineer. YAVA is Aetna's conversational AI platform supporting voice and chat channels. We serve millions of customer interactions across multiple touchpoints. Our platform combines sophisticated NLP, backend services, and frontend experiences to deliver seamless conversational experiences.
Position SummaryWe are seeking a Staff Software Development Engineer to own and evolve our test infrastructure, enabling our engineering team to ship quality features at velocity. As a Staff Software Development Engineer, you will design test harnesses, establish testing best practices, and ensure our platform-including AI Agent capabilities-is thoroughly validated across API, backend, and full-stack scenarios.
This is not a Quality Assurance role. You are an Engineer with a testing focus, embedded with developers, contributing to sprint work, test strategy, and platform reliability.
Roles and Responsibilities- Define and drive the enterprise test strategy for Conversational AI platforms across Voice and Chat channels, partnering with Product, Architecture, and Engineering teams to establish quality standards, test coverage goals, and acceptance criteria.
- Design, build, and maintain scalable test frameworks and harnesses for APIs, backend services, and end-to-end conversational experiences, enabling engineering teams to efficiently test, validate, and own product quality.
- Develop specialized quality engineering solutions for conversational AI, including validation of multi-turn conversations, intent recognition, orchestration logic, agent interactions, and customer experience outcomes across channels.
- Lead quality governance for releases by identifying testing gaps, driving defect resolution, monitoring quality metrics, automating test execution, and ensuring platform changes protect and improve end-user experiences.
- Serve as a technical mentor and quality champion, providing reusable patterns, documentation, training, and hands-on guidance in test-driven development, automation best practices, and complex testing scenarios while helping teams eliminate testing friction and close quality gaps.
Required Qualifications- 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in test automation/SDET roles, with expertise in developing and scaling automated testing solutions.
- Strong technical proficiency in Java or Node.js, object-oriented design, API testing (REST, contract testing, mocking), and building reusable test frameworks and automation tools.
- Hands-on experience with modern testing platforms and tools, including Playwright, Selenium, Cucumber, Postman, SOAPUI, Bruno, Hammer, Cyara, JUnit, Jest, and CI/CD pipelines such as GitHub Actions.
- Expertise in quality engineering for Conversational AI, including Voice and Chat automation, test data management, full-stack testing, and validation of AI/LLM-driven experiences.
- Strong leadership and communication skills, with the ability to define testing strategies, document best practices, mentor engineers, and drive adoption of quality engineering standards; onsite availability in Hartford, CT or Wellesley, MA required.
Preferred Qualifications- Deep expertise in quality engineering and test automation, including designing and developing scalable test frameworks, automation tools, and quality-focused APIs.
- Experience with Conversational AI platforms, including testing Voice and Chat applications, conversational workflows, and customer interaction journeys.
- Hands-on experience with API virtualization, contract testing, and mocking technologies to enable reliable and efficient testing across distributed systems.
- Knowledge of performance, load, and resiliency testing frameworks, with experience validating scalability, reliability, and system performance under varying workloads.
- Familiarity with AI/LLM quality engineering practices, including testing AI agents, evaluating model responses, and validating accuracy, safety, and user experience outcomes.
Education- Bachelor's degree from accredited university or equivalent work experience (High School Diploma/GED + 4 years relevant experience).
Pay RangeThe typical pay range for this role is:
$130,295.00 - $260,590.00
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 peopleWe 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: 08/20/2026
