Principal Engineer - Cloud
Early Warning Services1 day ago
Chicago, IL, USA +2 moreStaff+
Base Salary
$173k - $276k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define cloud engineering strategy, reference architectures, technical standards, and enterprise implementation patterns for AWS infrastructure and platform capabilities.
- Lead architecture and implementation of scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-optimized cloud-native solutions using AWS services.
- Solve complex infrastructure and platform problems spanning multiple systems, teams, and technology layers.
- Lead root cause analysis, corrective actions, reliability improvements, and operational readiness for significant incidents.
- Establish enterprise infrastructure-as-code, automation, and CI/CD practices using Terraform and related delivery tooling.
- Design and maintain cloud controls supporting PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FFIEC, and other regulatory and policy requirements.
- Provide technical leadership for internal and external audits, including control evidence and audit-readiness improvements.
- Architect and validate disaster recovery, high availability, backup, and fault-tolerant strategies for critical cloud services.
- Define cloud security practices covering identity and access management, network segmentation, encryption, key management, secrets handling, and secure workload configuration.
- Drive cloud vulnerability management, configuration compliance, remediation, patching, and hardening strategies.
- Establish observability standards for logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting across complex transactional systems.
- Influence technical roadmaps, investment decisions, cloud adoption, operability, and platform consistency across engineering teams.
- Advise engineering leaders and senior stakeholders on cloud architecture, risk, tradeoffs, and long-term technical direction.
- Produce technical documentation, standards, architecture artifacts, and guidance, and mentor engineers and technical leaders.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field, or a demonstrated portfolio consistent with the role’s experience requirements.
- Typically 15 years of experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or related technical roles.
- Typically 5 years of experience designing and operating AWS solutions at enterprise scale.
- Deep expertise in AWS compute, storage, networking, identity, container orchestration, and managed data services.
- Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, container platforms, Linux environments, and distributed systems design.
- Experience leading architecture and technical direction for large-scale, business-critical cloud platforms or migrations.
- Ability to influence engineers, architects, and leaders across multiple teams without direct authority.
- Strong experience scaling infrastructure-as-code practices with Terraform and related automation tooling.
- Strong knowledge of CI/CD, testing, secure engineering, operational readiness, and software delivery lifecycle disciplines.
- Experience implementing and governing security and compliance controls aligned with PCI-DSS, SOC 2, or FFIEC.
- Strong experience designing and operationalizing observability solutions for complex, high-availability transactional environments.
- Strong judgment evaluating reliability, security, cost, speed, and maintainability tradeoffs, along with strong communication and documentation skills.
- Background and drug screen required.
- Preferred qualifications include a master’s degree, AWS or other cloud certifications, regulated-environment cloud migration experience, policy-as-code and cloud governance experience, developer enablement experience, monitoring-platform experience, workload-security experience, programming or scripting experience, payments-network knowledge, and FinTech, banking, payments, or regulated-industry experience.
Benefits
- Hybrid work model.
- Base pay ranges from $173,000 to $230,000 in Phoenix or Chicago and from $207,000 to $276,000 in San Francisco, plus a discretionary incentive plan.
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage, with HSA contributions and FSA options.
- 401(k) plan with a 100% company safe-harbor match on the first 6% deferred, immediately upon eligibility.
- Flexible time off for exempt employees or generous PTO for non-exempt employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and one paid volunteer day.
- 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
- Maven Family Planning support covering fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, pediatrics, and return-to-work support.
About Early Warning Services
Early Warning Services builds payment networks and fraud/risk mitigation solutions for U.S. banks and credit unions. It operates the Zelle peer-to-peer payments network and is rolling out Paze, a digital wallet, alongside identity verification and account risk services. Headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, it is owned by a consortium of major U.S. banks and partners with thousands of financial institutions nationwide.