Principal System Engineering

About the role

The Principal Systems Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for the reliability, security, scalability, governance, and strategic direction of critical enterprise platforms and cloud services. They will design, architect, and evolve enterprise-grade applications, platforms, and integration services by transforming business requirements into resilient technical solutions. Provide technical leadership for Kafka and IXBUS platforms, enabling event-driven architectures, real-time data exchange, and enterprise integration capabilities that deliver scalability, reliability, observability, and operational excellence across cloud and on-premises environments.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the senior technical leader and primary platform steward for critical enterprise platforms and cloud services.
• Define and influence platform strategy, technical direction, architecture alignment, and long-term modernization roadmaps.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives across Engineering, Operations, Architecture, Cybersecurity, Support, and business stakeholders.
• Establish and promote engineering standards, operational best practices, automation principles, and platform governance models.
• Own platform reliability, scalability, resiliency, lifecycle planning, operational readiness, and business continuity posture.
• Lead compliance, cybersecurity, access governance, risk-management, and audit-readiness initiatives.
• Drive automation-first approaches across infrastructure, deployments, operational workflows, support processes, and self-service capabilities.
• Provide strategic oversight for CI/CD pipeline governance, release standards, artifact management, infrastructure automation, and deployment maturity.
• Lead observability, monitoring, alerting, logging, and service health strategies to improve operational visibility and reduce incident impact.
• Act as the highest-level escalation point for complex technical issues, major incidents, and platform-impacting events.
• Lead root cause analysis, problem management, corrective action planning, and prevention of recurring issues.
• Guide capacity planning, cloud cost optimization, licensing strategy, technology lifecycle management, and platform sustainability.
• Own disaster recovery strategy, planning, exercises, documentation, and continuous improvement.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, helping raise the engineering maturity of the broader organization.
• Influence decisions without direct authority by building alignment, communicating tradeoffs, and driving consensus.

Requirements

• Deep experience designing, operating, and governing enterprise-scale platforms and cloud infrastructure.
• 7+ years of cloud platforms, infrastructure services, platform engineering, and cloud governance practices.
• Experience with containerized workloads, orchestration platforms, microservices architectures, and cloud-native deployment patterns.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, release automation, artifact management, infrastructure automation, and deployment governance.
• Experience with monitoring, alerting, observability, logging, service health, and operational telemetry strategies.
• Strong knowledge of security controls, access governance, role-based access management, separation of duties, and compliance practices.
• Experience leading platform upgrades, lifecycle management, migration planning, disaster recovery, and resiliency improvements.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across infrastructure, application platforms, integrations, networking, and operational workflows.
• Ability to define standards for SOPs, runbooks, operational playbooks, technical documentation, and support readiness.
• Working knowledge of cost optimization, capacity planning, license management, and technology lifecycle planning.
• Strategic thinker with strong business and technical judgment.
• Proven ability to lead through influence across multiple teams and organizations.
• Strong executive communication, stakeholder management, and decision-framing skills.
• Ability to mentor, coach, and develop engineering talent.
• Strong ownership mindset with accountability for outcomes, reliability, governance, and customer impact.
• Ability to drive alignment across technical, operational, security, and business priorities.
• Calm, decisive leadership during incidents, escalations, and high-pressure situations.
• Strong collaboration skills with Architecture, Development, Operations, Security, Product, and Support teams.
• Ability to simplify complex problems and communicate clear recommendations.
• Commitment to continuous improvement, operational excellence, innovation, and engineering discipline.

Preferred Skills

• Experience leading enterprise platform modernization or transformation initiatives.
• Experience defining platform roadmaps, maturity models, service ownership models, or operational governance frameworks.
• Experience applying AI or intelligent automation to improve support operations, engineering productivity, or customer experience.
• Experience with large-scale compliance programs, cybersecurity scorecards, audit preparation, and remediation tracking.
• Experience leading disaster recovery exercises, business continuity planning, and resiliency validation.
• Experience influencing architecture review boards, technology standards, or enterprise engineering practices.
• Experience managing vendor relationships, licensing strategy, or platform service contracts.
• Experience developing metrics and executive dashboards for reliability, cost, risk, and operational performance.
• Experience mentoring technical leads or senior engineers in a matrixed organization.
• Experience driving cultural change toward automation, accountability, reliability, and self-service engineering.

Pay

Annual salary range: $155,400.00 - $261,100.00 USD. Individual starting salary within this range may depend on geography, experience, expertise, and education/training.

Benefits

• Medical/Dental/Vision coverage
• 401(k) plan
• Tuition reimbursement program
• Paid Time Off and Holidays (based on date of hire, at least 23 days of vacation each year and 9 company-designated holidays)
• Paid Parental Leave
• Paid Caregiver Leave
• Adoption Reimbursement
• Disability Benefits (short term and long term)
• Life and Accidental Death Insurance
• Supplemental benefit programs: critical illness/accident hospital indemnity/group legal
• Employee Assistance Programs (EAP)
• Extensive employee wellness programs
• Employee discounts up to 50% off on eligible AT&T mobility plans and accessories, AT&T internet (and fiber where available) and AT&T phone

Schedule

This position requires office presence of a minimum of 5 days per week and is only located in the location(s) posted. No relocation is offered. Weekly Hours: 40. Time Type: Regular. Locations: Alpharetta, Georgia; Bedminster, New Jersey; Dallas, Texas; Middletown, New Jersey; Plano, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia.