Principal Cloud DevOps Engineer

Description

The company builds software that helps finance teams plan, analyze and report on financial and operational data for some of the world's largest organizations. It is a fast-growing SaaS business hosted on Microsoft Azure in regions around the world.

This Principal-level role gives you technical leadership over the design and automation of scalable, secure cloud environments. You will set cloud direction, shape technical decisions, solve hard problems and mentor engineers across the company, working with teams across the organization to keep cloud operations reliable and efficient at scale.

The team is spread across continents and time zones and is focused on helping finance organizations move faster with clearer information.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical strategy and multi-quarter roadmap for Cloud Engineering's core areas: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containers and AKS, observability, and security.
• Represent Cloud Engineering in cross-functional and leadership meetings with Product, Security, Compliance, Platform, and QE.
• Lead large, multi-quarter initiatives that cut across departments and engineering teams, making sure people agree, adopt the work, and deliver it.
• Act as the final escalation point for the most complex production incidents and drive fixes for systemic technical debt.
• Mentor engineers and raise the level of technical leadership and standards, without relying on formal authority.
• Design solutions that are technically sound while keeping the financial impact on the organization in view.
• Own the Terraform codebase from start to finish: module design and versioning, remote state on Azure Storage backends, splitting state by lifecycle and ownership, and detecting drift.
• Build security into code: default to managed identities and workload identity federation, integrate Key Vault, define RBAC and Azure Policy as Terraform resources, and scan container images through ACR and Defender for Containers.
• Design for reliability: multi-region failover with Traffic Manager or Front Door, backup and disaster recovery with Azure Backup and paired regions, and observability with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights. Work with development and business teams to define SLOs and error budgets.
• Build reusable, versioned Terraform modules and AKS blueprints that other engineering teams can deploy on their own as the company's paved road.

Requirements

• Hold a bachelor's degree (BS or BA) in computer science, engineering, or a related field.
• Have 10+ years of hands-on experience in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, or platform engineering, including IaC with Terraform or Bicep, CI/CD and GitOps, and cloud architecture, preferably on Azure.
• Have a track record of owning technical strategy and driving standards across the whole organization, not only within one team.
• Have clearly improved developer experience in a significant way.
• Know the Azure Well-Architected Framework in depth.
• Experience at a cloud service provider, managed service provider, or SaaS company is preferred.
• Experience shaping cloud-native strategy at scale, for example on Kubernetes/AKS, Azure SQL, Azure AI Foundry, or Azure API Management, is preferred.
• Relevant certifications such as AZ-305, AZ-400, or CISSP are a plus.
• Experience designing and building solutions for common compliance frameworks such as FedRAMP, DoD IL4, SOC, and SOX is preferred.
• Comfortable working with high ambiguity and thinking strategically and abstractly.
• Able to build presence and sound judgment, and to influence leaders at every level.

Conditions

This role has no direct reports.

Travel is expected to stay under 10%.

Remote work. Pay is set by experience, skills, and location, using objective, job-related criteria. Gross annual base salary is $151,000 - $196,000 USD. Additional variable pay and benefits may apply.

Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the country where the role is based, without sponsorship.

Benefits

• Medical plan
• Dental and vision insurance
• Life insurance
• Short- and long-term disability coverage
• Vacation time
• Paid holidays
• Professional development
• Retirement plan