Hybrid Lead Director Engineering, SRE – Retail & Pharmacy

at CVS Health

• Job title: Lead Director Engineering, SRE – Retail & Pharmacy
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $144,200 - $288,400 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Azure, Cloud, Grafana, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Splunk
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Woonsocket, United States

About the role

• Lead Director Engineering for SRE at CVS Health improving reliability of retail and pharmacy technology. Guiding a global technical team while executing strategic objectives and incident management.

Responsibilities

• Lead a global team of technical professionals, providing guidance, mentorship, and support to ensure their success and professional growth
• Align SRE strategies with enterprise goals, delivering resilient technology that enables world-class customer and patient experiences
• Execute on a multi-year roadmap for observability, automation, and reliability improvements across distributed store environments
• Define and implement standardization and process improvements across the SRE organization
• Define and maintain Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and business KPIs to measure and enhance system reliability for critical store applications
• Build and optimize dashboards, visualizations, and alerting systems to enable real-time insights and rapid incident response for edge nodes and remote facilities
• Provide weekly and monthly reporting on KPIs and other operational-based metrics to cross-functional teams and senior leadership
• Develop and implement strategic communication plans to support organizational goals, ensuring alignment with business objectives and stakeholder needs
• Reduce operational costs and increase efficiency through automation and platform engineering to reduce toil and enable self-healing capabilities across thousands of locations
• Lead major incident management, ensuring rapid detection, root-cause analysis, and resolution in collaboration with business and technology partners
• Champion modern cloud, edge, and AI-driven monitoring solutions for store technology
• Partner with architects, product engineering, and infrastructure teams to embed reliability practices throughout the software lifecycle
• Represent CVS Health as a thought leader in SRE and operational resilience, both internally and externally
• Mentor the SRE and technical teams on building, scaling, and operating highly available systems
• Foster a culture of ownership, honesty, accountability, and continuous improvement within the organization
• Contribute to long-term planning, technology adoption strategies, and innovation initiatives to drive digital modernization efforts

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience with cloud platform technologies such as: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud
• 8+ years of experience in a technical leadership or people management role, with a proven ability to lead and grow technical teams, particularly within SRE or large-scale reliability organizations
• 8+ years of experience leading complex technical initiatives using Agile/continuous improvement methodologies
• 8+ years of managing distributed technology environments (retail, healthcare, or other multi-site operations strongly preferred)
• 5+ years of experience in container orchestration (Kubernetes) and using monitoring tools (Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Splunk, Grafana, etc.)
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure components (compute, storage, networking, security)
• Strong knowledge of Point of Sale (POS), pharmacy systems, handheld devices, store servers, and network infrastructure
• Exceptional communication, decision-making, and problem-solving skills, with demonstrated ability to influence senior executives and cross-functional teams (technical and non-technical)
• Experience leading performance reviews, career development planning, and team capacity management
• Mastery of incident management, observability, automation, and operational excellence practices
• Adept at resource planning, program delivery, and change leadership at enterprise scale
• Adept at collaboration, teamwork, and fostering an inclusive engineering culture

Benefits

• Affordable medical plan options
• 401(k) plan (including matching company contributions)
• Employee stock purchase plan
• No-cost programs including wellness screenings, tobacco cessation and weight management programs, confidential counseling and financial coaching
• 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