Principal Network Engineer - AI Infrastructure

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 The Principal Network Engineer – AI Infrastructure plays a key role in building the high‑performance network infrastructure that powers the organization’s AI and GPU‑driven workloads. This position is responsible for designing and delivering scalable data center solutions that support large‑scale training and inference platforms. By leveraging modern architectures such as leaf‑spine fabrics, and aligning with leading vendor and industry reference designs, the role helps enable reliable, high‑throughput environments that directly support critical business initiatives.

Working closely with engineering, platform, and security partners, this role helps connect network, compute, and security capabilities into a cohesive, high‑performing ecosystem. In addition to hands‑on technical contribution, the position provides guidance on best practices, supports the development of other engineers, and helps shape the future direction of the organization’s AI infrastructure. Through continuous improvement, thoughtful design, and a focus on performance and resilience, this role contributes to a secure and scalable foundation that supports long‑term growth and innovation.

Role Responsibilities Collaboration & Expertise

• Partner with compute, storage, platform, and security teams to design integrated AI infrastructure solutions.
• Serve as a senior technical authority aligning network designs with NVIDIA, Cisco, and industry reference architecture.
• Influence enterprise network and security strategy through collaboration with engineering leadership and stakeholders.

Analysis & Configuration

• Design and implement high-performance data center networks optimized for AI/GPU workloads, including leaf‑spine and EVPN/VXLAN fabrics.
• Integrate networking with GPU clusters and high-performance storage systems supporting training and inference workloads.
• Optimize network performance (latency, throughput, congestion) for large-scale distributed environments.
• Evaluate and deploy advanced networking technologies to improve scalability, reliability, and security.

Operational Support

• Support 24/7 infrastructure operations, including on-call responsibilities across cloud, on-prem, and colocation environments.
• Lead incident response and resolution for network-related issues, driving root cause analysis and resilience improvements.

Mentorship and Training

• Mentor and develop engineers, promoting best practices in networking and security.
• Support knowledge sharing through training sessions and technical enablement.

Innovation and Research

• Evaluate and adopt emerging AI infrastructure and networking technologies (e.g., high-speed interconnects, next gen switching).
• Contribute to research, innovation, and continuous improvement of network and security capabilities.

Strategic Planning

• Define and drive the data center network strategy supporting AI/ML platforms and business initiatives.
• Establish standards and reference architecture aligned with industry best practices.
• Guide long-term roadmap decisions, balancing performance, scalability, security, and risk.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in network engineering, with at least 5+ years in a leadership, architectural, or lead engineering role delivering enterprise or cloud network initiatives end-to-end.
• 5+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale data center networks, including Layer 2/3 architectures (leaf-spine/Clos), EVPN/VXLAN overlays, and high-speed networking (100/200/400Gb+).
• 5+ years of experience with enterprise routing, switching, and network platforms, including Cisco-centric data center fabrics, protocols (BGP, OSPF, MPLS, STP), and hybrid connectivity (SD-WAN, VPN, remote access).
• 5+ years of experience implementing network security technologies, including Palo Alto Networks firewalls (required), NGFW, IDS/IPS, ZTNA, DLP, and micro-segmentation, with understanding of application-aware and zero trust…