Description
CVS Health is seeking an experienced and strategic leader to oversee Release Engineering for the Pharmacy & Consumer Wellness.
Release Engineering owns the safety, consistency, and recoverability of application, platform, infrastructure, and edge changes across CVS Health's pharmacy, retail, and digital technology ecosystem (~9,000 stores, centralized platforms, and edge/dispensing systems).
The team defines and enforces the standards, guardrails, gates, and validation logic into pipelines that ride on top of existing CI/CD and DevX investments, and drives their consistent adoption.
Primary Objectives:
- Change Failure Reduction
- Own Change Failure Rate (CFR) as the primary success metric
- Reduce deployment-induced incidents through deployment automation, validation, and recovery engineering
- Maintain release-to-incident correlation to support postmortems and problem management
- Deployment Guardrail & Governance Engineering
- Define, enhance, operate CI/CD capabilities and deployment automation
- Standardize delivery patterns across application, infrastructure, and edge platforms
- Improve deployment reliability, consistency, and developer experience
- Deployment Safety & Validation
- Establish automated pre- and post-deployment validation
- Integrate synthetic testing, health checks, and observability signals into deployment workflows
- Ensure production health is verified before deployment completion
- Fleet-Scale Deployment Management
- Define and enforce ring-based deployment strategies for store, edge, and centralized platforms
- Enable progressive delivery, automated promotion gates, and controlled rollout strategies
- Minimize blast radius through phased deployment patterns
- Recovery Engineering
- Ensure every deployment has tested rollback or failback capabilities
- Improve recovery time for release-related incidents through automation
- Enable feature flags, traffic controls, and deployment safety mechanisms
- Infrastructure Change Reliability
- Standardize validation and rollback requirements for high-risk infrastructure changes
- Automate post-maintenance verification and health validation
- Partner with infrastructure teams to improve change reliability and reduce change-induced incidents
- Incident & Learning Integration
- Provide deployment and change context during major incidents
- Support release impact analysis during postmortems
- Drive deployment-related improvements from incident learnings and problem records
- Leadership Responsibilities
- Build and develop a high-performing Release Engineering organization
- Establish engineering-first delivery practices that prioritize reliability and safety, without adding adoption friction
- Champion automation, standardization, and continuous improvement across the software delivery lifecycle
- Partner with SRE, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, Product Engineering, and Change Management to improve production reliability
Success Measures:
- 90 Days
- Establish CFR baseline across key platforms
- Implement standardized deployment validation and rollback requirements
- Integrate PRR requirements into release workflows
- 6 Months
- Automated deployment validation operational for priority platforms
- Ring-based deployment model implemented for selected domains
- Measurable reduction in change-related incidents
- 12 Months
- Enterprise deployment platform standardized across major domains
- Automated deployment safety gates integrated with observability and SLO signals
- CFR and deployment recovery metrics consistently reported and improved
- Release Engineering recognized as a key enabler of reliability and operational excellence
Required Qualifications:
- 7+ years of senior software engineering leadership experience, with people management skills in high-growth or high-availability environments
- 3+ years of deep hands-on background in CI/CD systems (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Harness), cloud platforms (Azure, GCP) and containerization (Kubernetes, Docker)
- 3+ years of experience optimizing complex build systems and branching/merging strategies
- 3+ years of experience bridging the gap between engineering depth and business impact
- 3+ years of experience focused on automation and customer service excellence
Preferred Qualifications:
- Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, including executive-level engagement, ability to lead cross-functional teams, including offshore/onshore vendor teams
- Experience implementing and improving SRE metrics in distributed environments
Pay Range: $130,295.00 - $260,590.00