Principal Engineer – Azure Cloud Platform

About the Role

The Principal Engineer – Azure Cloud Platform is a hands-on individual contributor and technical leader responsible for designing, developing, and enhancing Walgreens’ enterprise cloud platform across Microsoft Azure and the company’s private cloud environment. This role creates scalable, resilient, and secure infrastructure solutions that enable application and business teams to deploy services effectively across cloud environments.

This position combines hands-on engineering, solution design, and enterprise-level technical influence. The Principal Engineer will help shape the future of Walgreens’ cloud platform while serving as a trusted technical partner to architecture, security, engineering, and business teams. The strongest candidate will bring a solid cloud infrastructure foundation, sound technical judgment, and the ability to communicate clearly, navigate change, and lead through influence.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction and solution design for highly complex cloud initiatives spanning multiple systems, processes, and teams.
• Design reusable infrastructure solutions for application and business teams deploying into Microsoft Azure and Walgreens’ private cloud environment.
• Work hands-on with Azure infrastructure, Kubernetes, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), infrastructure-as-code, cloud networking, deployment automation, and containerized environments.
• Develop and enhance cloud deployment capabilities using technologies such as Terraform and Harness.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, engineering teams, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into secure, scalable platform solutions.
• Establish technical standards and ensure cloud solutions align with architecture, security, compliance, and operational expectations.
• Evaluate technical options, communicate tradeoffs, and influence decisions across the organization.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers without formal people-management responsibility.
• Plan, design, develop, and test software systems or applications for software enhancements and new products, including cloud-based or internet-related tools for highly strategic and complex high-risk undertakings.
• Lead in developing the technical vision and design specifications for assigned projects and oversee implementation.
• Develop or lead in developing technical business approaches and new or enhanced technical tools.
• Own the development and rollout for entire products or large projects as assigned. Champion process (Scrum, TDD, etc.). Write tech specs and identify risks before starting major projects. Set standards and reduce complexity.
• Use technical expertise in infrastructure design, software design, architecture, and software system interrelationships.
• Design solutions that provide a high level of resiliency for LAN, WAN, and Information Systems.
• Design multi-cloud solutions, plan, design, configure, and install network hardware in support of customer requirements.
• Interact with internal and external peers and management to share highly complex information related to areas of expertise and gain acceptance of new or enhanced technology business solutions.
• May lead teams and projects.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree and at least 6 years of experience in Engineering, Software Engineering, or similar OR High School Diploma/GED and at least 9 years of experience in Engineering, Software Engineering, or similar.
• Experience writing code for highly complex and strategic applications of major importance.
• Experience in algorithms, systems, architecture, and bits-and-bytes.
• Experience with programming languages, such as C, C++, UNIX, XML, Python, Perl, and/or Java.
• Experience managing or implementing systems on the OSI model in large and distributed environments.
• At least 2 years of experience contributing to financial decisions in the workplace.
• At least 3 years of direct leadership, indirect leadership, and/or cross-functional team leadership.
• Willing to travel up to/at least 10% of the time for business purposes (within state and out of state).

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Information Technology; Master’s Degree preferred.
• Experience working in an Agile environment.
• Cisco, CCNP, CCIE, or similar vendor certifications along with Cloud Network Engineer certifications.
• 9+ years of experience leading a group of automation/DevOps engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience in deployment automation for various applications, IaaS, and PaaS platforms on large complex systems.
• Hands-on experience in automation software like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, or equivalent.
• Experience in implementation of CI/CD pipelines for Cloud deployments using containers/Docker for a large ecosystem.
• Experience in GIT workflows, pipelines, and code repository management for agile development.
• Experience working on Kubernetes platform on a microservices architecture and other DevOps tooling on high-traffic applications.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure components (e.g., databases, networking, DNS, cloud services, orchestration tools, containerization).
• Experience in operationalizing high-traffic web applications through monitoring and alerting for a polyglot application stack.
• 8+ years of experience leading Infrastructure and Automation Teams and hands-on expertise in migrating and optimizing on-premises infrastructure to Cloud.
• 8+ years of experience with Azure-based PaaS & SaaS services (ASE, Azure Databricks, Azure Datalake, Azure AD, Azure ADDS, etc.).
• 8+ years of experience with Azure Infrastructure services (VMs, VNETs, Subnets, NSGs, Resource Groups, etc.) deployment.
• 8+ years of experience in scripting and automation with Azure CLI, PowerShell, Bash, Ruby, Terraform, Pulumi, Bicep, JSON templates, etc.
• 8+ years of experience working with Private endpoints, ExpressRoute, VNET Gateway, ASR, DNS, load balancing, etc.
• Experience working with Linux, Windows, Azure Active Directory, Roles, and Policies.
• Experience troubleshooting network procedures and best practices; experience with network challenges associated with systems integration, including COTS integration, capacity analysis, and system architecture design.
• Experience in the use of network analysis tools.

About Walgreens

Founded in 1901, Walgreens (www.walgreens.com) has a storied heritage of caring for communities for generations and proudly serves nearly 9 million customers and patients each day across its approximately 8,500 stores throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and leading omni-channel platforms. Walgreens has approximately 220,000 team members, including nearly 90,000 healthcare service providers, and is committed to being the first choice for retail pharmacy and health services, building trusted relationships that create healthier futures for customers, patients, team members, and communities.

Schedule

Deerfield, Illinois — hybrid, with four days in the office and one day remote.

Pay

The salary range for this role is $136,000 - $231,300 per year. The actual salary offered will depend on a variety of factors including geography, skills and abilities, education, experience, and other relevant factors.