Senior Distinguished Engineer

About the role

The Senior Distinguished Engineer – Cloud Services is the company’s foremost technical authority for enterprise cloud services and cloud-native platform capabilities. This leader is responsible for defining the strategy, architecture, engineering standards, and long-term technical direction for the managed services that application teams consume across the enterprise.

Responsibilities

• Serves as a recognized senior technical individual contributor supporting our most demanding, cross-functional projects across the pillar.
• A visionary leader, builder, and an operator. Drives best practices, architectures, and technology decisions inside the tech function (as applicable) and the organization.
• Establish the cloud services roadmap aligned with business priorities.
• Evaluate emerging cloud capabilities and determine enterprise adoption strategies.
• Create service standards that balance developer experience, security, operational excellence, and cost.
• Provide technical leadership and strategic direction for the enterprise cloud services portfolio, including data, integration, platform, networking, security, observability, AI/ML, storage, and developer enablement services.
• Define and evolve enterprise reference architectures, engineering standards, and design patterns for cloud services.
• Drive standardization, rationalization, and adoption of enterprise cloud services to reduce complexity and maximize reuse across the organization.
• Lead the design of highly available, resilient, secure, scalable, and cost-effective cloud service platforms.
• Champion Infrastructure as Code, automation, and platform engineering practices to simplify provisioning, lifecycle management, and operations.
• Develop reusable cloud service modules, reference implementations, and engineering patterns that accelerate solution delivery.
• Partner with application engineering teams to improve developer experience through self-service capabilities, standardized service offerings, golden paths, templates, SDKs, and technical guidance.
• Establish operational excellence standards for cloud services, including reliability, observability, performance, capacity planning, disaster recovery, incident reduction, and automated operations.
• Drive continuous improvement of cloud platforms through automation, operational telemetry, resilience engineering, and cost optimization.
• Establish enterprise governance for cloud services by defining technical standards, evaluating new technologies, approving service patterns, and rationalizing overlapping capabilities.
• Influence enterprise technology strategy and architecture decisions while balancing innovation, operational excellence, security, and long-term sustainability.
• Serve as the organization's highest-level technical authority for enterprise cloud services, providing mentorship, architectural guidance, and cross-functional technical leadership.
• Consults and collaborates closely with Engineering leaders, Architecture, Security, and potentially external collaboration partners (FIs) that may be engaged with us on key efforts over the years.
• Keeps executive-level leaders informed of progress and problems. Balances technical leadership and savvy with strong business judgment to make the right decisions about technology choices. Makes recommendations at a critical level.

Requirements

Education or experience typically obtained through completion of a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems, Information Technology, Information Systems, Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.

• Minimum 15 or more years of progressive software engineering experience; recognized as a technical expert with demonstrated experience mentoring and leading large-scale deliverables and processes in a Technology organization.
• Minimum 5 or more years of software engineering experience dealing with large scale systems in the cloud.
• Minimum 5 or more years of experience implementing application solutions/services in Cloud using Containerization, CI/CD, Automated testing and in compliance security guidelines.
• Possesses a deep understanding of executing highly scalable, distributed applications in cloud environments.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively in cross-functional groups and generate results.
• Excellent interpersonal, oral, and written communication skills. Must convey responsiveness and competence when dealing with internal customers, staff, peers, senior management, and vendors.
• Superior leadership presence with strong business acumen.

Qualifications

• Master’s Degree; additional related education and/or related work experience preferred.
• Experience with large-scale enterprises scaling out operations in Amazon Web Services is highly favorable.
• Functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straight-forward solutions.
• Experience; with migrating application & data services from on-prem to Cloud.
• Deep hands-on technical expertise in at least one major technical area: large scale full stack development, building complex distributed systems, designing massive global networks.

Skills

• Deep understanding of executing highly scalable, distributed applications in cloud environments.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership through large-scale system designs, upgrades, and releases.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and energize people showcasing technical and leadership skills.
• Recognized in the industry as a technical expert in their field through published works, patents and/or industry speaking engagements.
• Recognized as a technical expert with demonstrated experience mentoring and leading large-scale deliverables and processes in a Technology organization.
• Experience with large-scale enterprises scaling out operations in Amazon Web Services is highly favorable.
• Functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straight-forward solutions.
• Experience; with migrating application & data services from on-prem to Cloud.
• Deep hands-on technical expertise in at least one major technical area: large scale full stack development, building complex distributed systems, designing massive global networks.

Benefits

This position is eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits. The Base Pay Scale For This Position In Phoenix, AZ/ Chicago, IL in USD per year is: $248,000 - $330,000. 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).