Senior Software Engineer - SRE, Retail and Pharmacy

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.

Our Site Reliability Engineering team is the execution engine behind the reliability, availability, and performance of distributed store technology powering thousands of retail and pharmacy locations nationwide. We operate across pharmacy platforms, Point of Sale (POS) systems, handheld devices, store servers, dispensing systems, and edge computing infrastructure — spanning hybrid cloud and on-premises environments at massive fleet scale. Our engineering philosophy is grounded in five pillars:  Detection ,  Prevention ,  Recovery ,  Learning Loops , and  Developer Experience (DevX) . Our operating principle is the  reliability covenant : our success is not measured by incident response volume — it is measured by the reliability capability we transfer to the engineering teams we serve.  Your success in this role is measured by what the engineering teams in your domain can do independently after working with you , not by how indispensable you become to them. An SSE who has enabled a development team to detect, respond to, and learn from production failures without SRE involvement has delivered the highest-value outcome this role can produce. We track  operational toil as an engineering metric . Engineers at this level are expected to identify recurring manual work, eliminate it through automation, document the reduction, and treat toil accumulation as a reliability risk — not as a sign of operational expertise.

As a  Senior Software Engineer — SRE , you independently own the reliability posture of an assigned engineering domain. You are not waiting for direction — you are setting it for your domain. You design the alerting strategy, own the SLO health, lead incident command for production issues, facilitate postmortems, tune anomaly detection models, and partner directly with engineering domain owners to shift reliability left into design. You are a technical mentor to SE-level engineers and an escalation resource during active incidents. You have the technical depth to diagnose complex distributed system failures, the data instincts to distinguish genuine anomalies from noise in ML-generated signals, and the organizational skills to drive reliability practice adoption in teams that did not necessarily ask for SRE involvement. Scope:  Domain ownership — you operate independently and influence adjacent engineering teams. The Environment You Are Joining This role exists inside an active SRE transformation. The domain-based SRE ownership model you will operate within is in its early stages. Some of the toolchains you will work with are being built in parallel with the operational work. Engineering domain owners are simultaneously learning what SRE can offer them. This is an honest description of the role, not a caveat.  The opportunity is to shape a domain's reliability posture from the ground up in a large-scale, consequential technology environment. The engineering decisions you make will affect pharmacy dispensing, prescription fill workflows, and store operations across thousands of locations. If you are energized by the combination of technical depth and organizational building, the scope here is significant. If you are looking for a mature, fully-defined SRE environment where the frameworks and toolchains already exist, this role will feel like a different challenge. Success in this role requires  patience alongside technical rigor : you will demonstrate value before you demand process change, build