Principal Engineer - Cloud

About the role

The Principal Engineer - Cloud Engineering is a strategic individual contributor and technical leader responsible for defining and advancing Early Warning’s cloud engineering direction, architecture standards, and enterprise implementation approach. This role leads the most complex cloud engineering initiatives across teams and influences technical strategy for scalable, secure, resilient, and cost-effective cloud platforms.

Responsibilities

• Defines and leads cloud engineering strategy, reference architectures, and technical standards for AWS-based infrastructure and platform capabilities.
• Solves the most complex infrastructure and platform problems, including issues that span multiple systems, teams, and technology layers.
• Establishes enterprise patterns for infrastructure as code, automation, and CI/CD practices using tools such as Terraform and related delivery tooling.
• Partners with Security, Risk, and Compliance teams to design and maintain cloud controls that meet regulatory and policy requirements, including PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FFIEC, and other applicable standards.
• Architects disaster recovery, high availability, backup, and fault-tolerant strategies for critical cloud services and validates recovery approaches through testing and continuous improvement.
• Drives cloud vulnerability management and configuration compliance strategies to ensure remediation, patching, and hardening practices meet service level expectations.
• Defines and enforces cloud security best practices including identity and access management, network segmentation, encryption, key management, secrets handling, and secure workload configuration.
• Provides technical leadership for internal and external audits by shaping control evidence approaches, addressing audit requests, and improving audit readiness.
• Builds strong cross-functional relationships and serves as a trusted advisor to engineering leaders and senior stakeholders on cloud architecture, risk, tradeoffs, and long-term technical direction.
• Mentors engineers and technical leaders by raising engineering standards, sharing expertise, and guiding design and execution on high-impact initiatives.
• Supports the company’s commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.

Requirements

Education and/or experience typically obtained through a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field. Typically has 15 years of experience or demonstrated portfolio consistent with experience required of the role in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or related technical roles. Typically has 5 years of experience or demonstrated portfolio consistent with experience required of the role designing and operating solutions in AWS at enterprise scale.

• Deep expertise in AWS core services including compute, storage, networking, identity, container orchestration, and managed data services.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, container platforms, Linux environments, and distributed systems design.
• Demonstrated experience leading architecture and technical direction for large-scale, business-critical, cloud-based platforms or migrations.
• Demonstrated ability to influence engineers, architects, and leaders across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Strong experience establishing and scaling infrastructure as code practices using Terraform and related automation tooling.
• Strong knowledge of mature engineering practices including CI/CD, testing, secure engineering, operational readiness, and software delivery lifecycle disciplines.
• Proven experience implementing and governing security and compliance controls aligned with frameworks such as PCI-DSS, SOC 2, or FFIEC.
• Strong experience designing and operationalizing observability solutions for complex, high-availability transactional environments.
• Strong judgment in evaluating technical tradeoffs involving reliability, security, cost, speed, and maintainability.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• High level of customer responsiveness, strong documentation skills, attention to detail, and ability to prioritize effectively in ambiguous environments.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in computer science, management information systems, or related field.
• Current AWS certification(s) and/or other relevant cloud certifications.
• Experience leading large-scale cloud migration or modernization programs in regulated environments.
• Experience with policy-as-code, cloud governance frameworks, and developer enablement models that improve safe self-service adoption.
• Experience with monitoring and alerting platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Splunk, or AppDynamics.
• Experience with container and workload security technologies.
• Experience with programming or scripting languages such as Python, Java, C#, Ruby, or Shell.
• Knowledge of ACH/EFT and real-time payment networks, including RTP or FedNow.
• Experience in FinTech, banking, payments, or other highly regulated industries.

Skills

• Cloud engineering
• Infrastructure engineering
• Platform engineering
• DevOps
• CI/CD
• Testing
• Secure engineering
• Operational readiness
• Software delivery lifecycle
• Security and compliance controls
• Observability solutions
• Disaster recovery and high availability
• Container orchestration
• Identity and access management
• Network segmentation
• Encryption
• Key management
• Secrets handling
• Secure workload configuration

Benefits

Base Pay Scale For This Position In Phoenix, AZ/ Chicago, IL/Remote in USD per year is: $173,000 - $230,000. San Francisco, CA in USD per year is: $207,000 - $242,000. Additionally, candidates are eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits. This pay scale is subject to change and is not necessarily reflective of actual compensation that may be earned, nor a promise of any specific pay for any specific candidate, which is always dependent on legitimate factors considered at the time of job offer. Early Warning Services takes into consideration a variety of factors when determining a competitive salary offer, including, but not limited to, the job scope, market rates and geographic location of a position, candidate’s education, experience, training, and specialized skills or certification(s) in relation to the job requirements and compared with internal equity (peers).

The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow instructions and perform other related duties as assigned by their supervisor.