Are you a hands-on technical leader who thrives on solving complex problems, building scalable data products, and shaping enterprise strategy? We are looking for a Principal Engineer to drive Data Monetization architecture, accelerate delivery, and elevate engineering excellence across platforms, products, and teams. This is an individual contributor-first role where your impact comes through influence, innovation, technical leadership, and execution—not traditional people management.
This role requires a unique combination of engineering depth, product thinking, and business acumen. You will help transform data assets into trusted, reusable, and scalable products that create measurable business value while establishing the technical foundations required to support customer growth, operational excellence, governance, and innovation.
Responsibilities
- Lead architecture and solution design for complex data products, platforms, and cross-team initiatives, ensuring scalable, secure, and resilient systems.
- Act as the senior technical authority for high-impact, ambiguous challenges involving data platforms, analytics, governance, and monetization capabilities.
- Drive the design and evolution of reusable data products, platform services, APIs, and shared capabilities that can be leveraged across customers and business domains.
- Establish and champion engineering standards, data contracts, governance practices, observability, and operational excellence across the ecosystem.
- Contribute directly to critical work, including architecture, prototyping, design reviews, complex troubleshooting, and technical problem solving.
- Align technical direction across teams to reduce duplication, increase reuse, and strengthen platform consistency and scalability.
- Partner with engineering, product, operations, and business leaders to align technology investments with strategic business outcomes.
- Drive improvements in data quality, lineage, traceability, governance, and trust across the data lifecycle.
- Evaluate technical tradeoffs through the lens of customer value, adoption, scalability, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
- Operate as a force multiplier by improving engineering effectiveness, platform maturity, and delivery velocity across teams.
- Represent engineering in cross-functional and executive discussions, influencing decisions that shape product and platform strategy.
- Mentor senior engineers and help develop the next generation of technical leaders and architects.
- Support hiring and leveling decisions and contribute to building strong engineering talent and technical culture.
What This Role Is
- A principal-level technical leader driving enterprise and business impact through data products and platform strategy.
- A builder who stays close to the work and leads through technical excellence, execution, and influence.
- A systems thinker who understands how data, platforms, products, governance, and customer outcomes connect.
- A collaborator who raises the bar for engineering quality, platform maturity, and organizational effectiveness.
What This Role Is Not
- A traditional people manager role.
- A siloed individual contributor position focused on a single application or team.
- A purely advisory architecture role disconnected from delivery and execution.
- A technology specialist focused solely on tools without understanding business outcomes and customer value.
Success in This Role
- Teams deliver data products and platform capabilities faster with greater consistency, quality, and reliability.
- Architectural direction is clear, aligned, and broadly adopted across engineering organizations.
- Reusable platforms, services, and data products reduce duplication and accelerate delivery.
- Data quality, trust, governance, and observability improve across the ecosystem.
- Technical investments demonstrably improve customer outcomes, business value, scalability, and operational efficiency.
- Reduced rework, operational complexity, and ambiguity across teams.
- Senior engineers grow into broader, higher-impact technical leadership roles.
- Influence is recognized across engineering, product, operations, and leadership teams.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, architecture, distributed systems, and large-scale platform development ( AWS, Databricks, Data pipelines, Lakehouse architecture, API design, CI/CD, Observability, Data quality, Security and governance, Large-scale distributed systems ).
- Proven ability to lead complex, cross-team initiatives and deliver enterprise-scale solutions.
- Strong problem-solving skills with demonstrated success navigating ambiguity and organizational complexity.
- Experience designing and operating large-scale data platforms, analytics systems, or customer-facing data products.
- Demonstrated success establishing engineering standards, governance practices, and technical direction across multiple teams.
- Experience driving adoption of reusable platforms, services, APIs, or data products.
- Experience applying AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics technologies to create new business capabilities, improve decision-making, and accelerate data product innovation.
- Ability to identify opportunities where AI can enhance customer value, automate operational processes, and unlock new data monetization strategies.
- Familiarity with modern AI ecosystems, including LLMs, semantic search, vector databases, agent frameworks, and enterprise AI governance practices.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience operating at enterprise scale across multiple business domains.
- Strong understanding of data product management, data monetization, analytics platforms, or customer-facing data services.
- Experience with cloud-native architectures, AWS, Databricks, modern data platforms, and distributed systems.
- Experience implementing data governance, lineage, observability, quality frameworks, and operational controls.
- Track record of mentoring senior engineers and developing technical leaders.
- Strong ability to influence without direct authority across engineering, product, and business organizations.
- Experience evaluating architecture through the lens of business value, scalability, customer adoption, and FinOps principles.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.
If you will be working at home occasionally or permanently, the internet connection must be obtained through a cable broadband or fiber optic internet service provider with speeds of at least 10Mbps download/5Mbps upload.
For this position, we anticipate offering an annual salary of 149,000 - 248,300 USD / yearly, depending on relevant factors, including experience and geographic location.
This role is also anticipated to be eligible to participate in an annual bonus and long term incentive plan.
At The Cigna Group, you’ll enjoy a comprehensive range of benefits, with a focus on supporting your whole health. Starting on day one of your employment, you’ll be offered several health-related benefits including medical, vision, dental, and well-being and behavioral health programs. We also offer 401(k), company paid life insurance, tuition reimbursement, a minimum of 18 days of paid time off per year, paid holidays, and leaves of absence. For more details on our employee benefits programs, click here.
About The Cigna Group
Doing something meaningful starts with a simple decision, a commitment to changing lives. At The Cigna Group, we’re dedicated to improving the health and vitality of those we serve. Through our divisions Cigna Healthcare and Evernorth Health Services, we are committed to enhancing the lives of our clients, customers and patients. Join us in driving growth and improving lives.
Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, age, disability, sex, childbirth (including pregnancy) or related medical conditions including but not limited to lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, religion, national origin, ancestry, marital or familial status, genetic information, status with regard to public assistance, citizenship status or any other characteristic protected by applicable equal employment opportunity laws.
If you need a reasonable accommodation to complete the online application process, please email seeyourself@thecignagroup.com for assistance. Please note that this email inbox is dedicated to accommodation requests only and cannot provide application updates or accept resumes.
The Cigna Group has a tobacco-free policy and reserves the right not to hire tobacco/nicotine users in states where that is legally permissible. Candidates in such states who use tobacco/nicotine will not be considered for employment unless they enter a qualifying smoking cessation program prior to the start of their employment. These states include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Washington State.
Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with all federal, state and local ordinances.
