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. 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.

Summary We 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.

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.

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