Principal Cloud Reliability & FinOps Architect

AT&T; Dallas (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

AT&T in Dallas, Texas is seeking a Principal System Engineer to serve as a senior technical leader across FinOps, cloud optimization, system reliability, and AI-driven automation. You will shape and execute enterprise strategies to improve reliability, reduce cloud waste, and automate workflows across Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, and hybrid-cloud environments.

You will translate business priorities into durable technical solutions, influence cross-organizational roadmaps, and drive

Qualifications

• 7+ years of progressive experience in systems engineering.

Responsibilities

• Provide principal-level technical leadership for resilient, secure, scalable, and cost-efficient platforms across Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, and hybrid-cloud environments.
• Lead FinOps and infrastructure optimization capabilities, including cost allocation, showback, anomaly detection, forecasting, rightsizing, workload scheduling, commitment optimization, waste reduction, and validated savings realization.
• Develop policy-driven, closed-loop optimization workflows that move recommendations through identification, application-owner engagement, approval, ServiceNow change control, execution, validation, evidence capture, and reporting.
• Apply an automation-by-default approach using Python, PowerShell, Bash, REST APIs, Azure Functions, Power Automate, and event-driven services to reduce manual handoffs and operational toil.
• Design practical generative AI, AI-fueled coding, and agentic automation solutions for engineering operations, cost analysis, anomaly investigation, remediation guidance, executive reporting, knowledge retrieval, and decision support.
• Establish cloud-governance guardrails, policy-as-code controls, exception processes, auditability, and risk-based automation patterns aligned with security, architecture, compliance, and change-management requirements.
• Engineer secure identity and authorization models using RBAC, managed identities, service principals, privileged identity management, just-in-time access, least privilege, and time-bound permissions.
• Integrate optimization and automation capabilities with Terraform, GitHub, Azure DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, ServiceNow, monitoring platforms, cost-management tools, and enterprise data sources while preventing configuration drift.
• Advance reliability engineering practices, including observability, SLOs, capacity management, performance analysis, incident prevention, operational readiness, post-change validation, rollback planning, and continuous improvement.
• Build executive dashboards and operational scorecards that communicate cloud spend, reliability, automation coverage, optimization pipeline health, risk, realized savings, and customer or business outcomes.
• Lead proofs of concept, production readiness, phased adoption, and complex technical issue resolution in partnership with internal teams and strategic vendors.
• Mentor engineers, create reusable reference architectures and standards, and influence priorities across Reliability, FinOps, Security, Architecture, Finance, Operations, and application teams.
• Demonstrate AT&T leadership behaviors by serving customers first, moving faster, acting boldly, winning as one, and developing talent.

Job description

AT&T in Dallas, Texas is seeking a Principal System Engineer to serve as a senior technical leader across FinOps, cloud optimization, system reliability, and AI-driven automation. You will shape and execute enterprise strategies to improve reliability, reduce cloud waste, and automate workflows across Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, and hybrid-cloud environments.

You will translate business priorities into durable technical solutions, influence cross-organizational roadmaps, and drive