Staff Software Development 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

The Staff Software Development Engineer will architect and implement scalable search systems that support complex query understanding, relevance tuning, ranking strategies, and personalization at scale.

The Staff Software Development Engineer will lead the design and evolution of search pipelines, including ingestion, indexing, query parsing, retrieval, ranking, and result post-processing.

The right candidate will champion observability and experimentation, including relevance metrics, A/B testing, query analytics, and monitoring dashboards. The Staff Software Development Engineer will collaborate cross-functionally with product, data science, ML, and analytics teams to translate business requirements into high-quality search experiences. In this role you will champion observability and experimentation, including relevance metrics, A/B testing, query analytics, and monitoring dashboards.

Key Responsibilities will include

Driving relevance and ranking improvements using techniques such as:

• Query rewriting, synonym management, intent detection, and field boosting

  Learning-to-rank, behavioral signals, and offline/online evaluation frameworks

• Provide technical leadership in solution design and architecture reviews, partnering with principal engineers, architects, and product teams.

• Design and optimize event-driven systems using Kafka (or similar) for real-time indexing, user interaction signals, and search telemetry.

• Ensure systems meet performance, scalability, and reliability goals, including: Sub-100ms query latency targets High-throughput ingestion and near-real-time indexing Fault tolerance and graceful degradation

• Lead and participate in deep code reviews, enforcing best practices in search engineering, distributed systems, and data correctness.

• Influence the adoption of new search technologies, tooling, and frameworks to improve developer productivity and search quality.

• Serve as a technical mentor, providing guidance to senior and junior engineers and raising the overall search engineering bar across the organization.

• Act as a multiplier, identifying systemic issues in search quality or platform reliability and driving long-term architectural improvements.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant depth in search or data-intensive systems

• 3+ years of experience in: Information Retrieval concepts (inverted indexes, scoring models, relevance tuning) Query understanding, Relevancy and Ranking

• Experience designing and operating distributed, event-driven systems using Kafka or equivalent messaging platforms

• Demonstrated execution excellence, from design through production support

• Growth mindset with a track record of mentoring engineers and raising technical standards

• Experience with Search platforms: OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, and/or Solr

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with learning-to-rank, personalization, or ML-assisted relevance systems

• Hands-on experience with search experimentation frameworks, A/B testing, and offline evaluation

• Background in high-scale consumer or enterprise search platforms

• Familiarity with search analytics, click models, and behavioral signals

Education

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience (Highschool diploma plus 4 years relevant work experience)

Pay Range

The typical pay range for this role is:

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

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