Principal Cloud Engineer — Platform Strategy & Security

Early Warning; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 173,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

401(k) match

Paid time off

Paid parental leave

Maven Family Planning

Job summary

Early Warning is seeking a Principal Engineer - Cloud Engineering to lead cloud strategy, architecture standards, and enterprise implementations across AWS. You will guide cross-team decisions to deliver scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud platforms while migrating mission-critical applications from on-prem to AWS.

You will partner with security, risk, and compliance teams to meet regulatory requirements and mentor engineers, contributing to durable documentation and robust CI/CD

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field.
• 15 years of experience in cloud/infra engineering or related roles.
• 5 years of enterprise AWS design/operation experience.
• 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.
• Experience leading architecture and technical direction for large-scale, cloud-based platforms or migrations.

Responsibilities

• Defines cloud engineering strategy, reference architectures, and technical standards for AWS-based infrastructure and platform capabilities.
• Leads design of scalable, secure, and cost-optimized cloud-native solutions using AWS services (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, EKS, IAM, VPC, KMS).
• Solves complex infrastructure and platform problems across teams and layers.
• Leads root cause analysis for incidents and improves platform reliability and readiness.
• Establishes infrastructure as code and CI/CD practices using Terraform and related tooling.
• Collaborates with Security, Risk, and Compliance to meet PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FFIEC and other standards.
• Provides technical leadership for audits by shaping control evidence approaches.
• Architects disaster recovery, high availability, backup, and fault-tolerance strategies.
• Defines and enforces cloud security practices including IAM, network segmentation, encryption, and secrets handling.
• Drives cloud observability and implements logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerts.
• Influences roadmaps and investments to improve cloud adoption and operability.
• Mentors engineers and prepares durable architectural documentation.
• Supports risk management and data protection commitments.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK Stack

Splunk

AppDynamics

Python

Java

C#

Shell

Job description

Early Warning is seeking a Principal Engineer - Cloud Engineering to lead cloud strategy, architecture standards, and enterprise implementations across AWS. You will guide cross-team decisions to deliver scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud platforms while migrating mission-critical applications from on-prem to AWS.

You will partner with security, risk, and compliance teams to meet regulatory requirements and mentor engineers, contributing to durable documentation and robust CI/CD