Staff Software Engineer Jobs in Iowa

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

CVS Health is looking for hands-on, passionate people who want to join a high energy and growing team to make a difference in customers’ lives and who want to be on the forefront of digital innovation that aims to reinvent what a pharmacy and a health care company can be in the digital world. Currently, we are seeking a Staff Software Engineer – Search / AI who as a Senior technical leader, be responsible for driving architecture, design, and delivery of scalable, cloud-native platforms built on microservices architecture and AI capabilities. This role combines deep hands-on engineering with strategic leadership to build intelligent, distributed systems. The right candidate will be a strong analytical thinker and be able to simplify complex problems, processes or projects into component parts explore and evaluate them systematically. We love to collaborate and help each other and we want someone to share that ideology.

Expectations for the Role

• Drive enterprise architecture and technical strategy with strong focus on microservices-based design and AI platform engineering
• Design and develop highly scalable microservices architectures, including APIs, domain-driven services, and event-driven systems
• Lead the development and integration of AI/ML solutions, including LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic frameworks
• Develop scalable data platforms and pipelines to support real-time and batch processing across enterprise systems
• Enable AI-powered capabilities, including intelligent search, recommendations, and decision-support systems
• Lead the development and optimization of search algorithms and systems utilizing technologies such as Elastic/OpenSearch/Solr.
• Drive adoption of CI/CD, DevOps, and automated testing practices using modern tooling (GitHub, Jenkins, CircleCI, Harness)
• Ensure high standards of system reliability, observability, and performance through monitoring and operational excellence
• Collaborate with product managers, architects, and business stakeholders to deliver scalable, modular, and intelligent solutions
• Lead design reviews, defining best practices for microservices design, API contracts, and service governance, and mentoring engineers
• Drive responsible AI practices, including model evaluation, governance, and production readiness

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, including full software development lifecycle (design, development, testing, deployment)
• 5+ years of experience building enterprise-scale cloud-native applications (GCP, Azure, or AWS)
• 5+ years of programming skills in any one of the following programming languages: Java, Python, Kotlin, or Go, with an emphasis on backend and API-driven development
• 3+ years of experience in designing and developing microservices architecture, including service decomposition, API design, and event-driven patterns
• 2+ years of experience integrating AI/ML solutions, including familiarity with LLMs, RAG architectures, or AI-enabled applications
• 2+ years of experience designing and implementing distributed systems and microservices at scale, including resiliency, scalability, and fault tolerance
• Experience with any search technology such as ElasticSearch/OpenSearch/Solr/Lucene
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Strong understanding of observability, logging, monitoring, and production support

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience building intelligent data-driven systems, including personalization, recommendations, and analytics platforms
• Proficiency in machine learning, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, and mathematical methods, with exposure to search relevance and ranking techniques
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts and business implications effectively to diverse stakeholders

EDUCATION

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience (HS diploma + 4 years relevant experience)

BUSINESS OVERVIEW

Bring your heart to CVS Health Every one of us at CVS Health shares a single, clear purpose: Bringing our heart to every moment of your health. This purpose guides our commitment to deliver enhanced human-centric health care for a rapidly changing world. Anchored in our brand — with heart at its center — our purpose sends a personal message that how we deliver our services is just as important as what we deliver. Our Heart At Work Behaviors™ support this purpose. We want everyone who works at CVS Health to feel empowered by the role they play in transforming our culture and accelerating our ability to innovate and deliver solutions to make health care more personal, convenient and affordable. We strive to promote and sustain a culture of diversity, inclusion and belonging every day. CVS Health is an affirmative action employer, and is an equal opportunity employer, as are the physician-owned businesses for which CVS Health provides management services. We do not discriminate in recruiting, hiring, promotion, or any other personnel action based on race, ethnicity, color, national origin, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. We proudly support and encourage people with military experience (active, veterans, reservists and National Guard) as well as military spouses to apply for CVS Health job opportunities.

Pay Range

The typical pay range for this role is:

$106,605.00 - $284,280.00

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 offering a comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits that reflects our commitment to our colleagues and their families.

This full‑time position is eligible for a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the physical, emotional, and financial well‑being of colleagues and their families. The benefits for this position include medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, retirement savings options, wellness programs, and other resources, based on eligibility.

Additional details about available benefits are provided during the application process and on Benefits Moments.

We anticipate the application window for this opening will close on: 08/28/2026

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