Principal Engineer – Cloud Engineering

Jobtailor; Arizona; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor is seeking a senior cloud engineering leader to define and drive AWS-based strategy and standards. You will design scalable, secure, and cost-conscious cloud-native solutions, mentor engineers, and guide risk-based controls aligned with PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FFIEC.

You will own infrastructure as code, CI/CD practices with Terraform, and lead audits, DR planning, and high-availability initiatives across enterprise platforms.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field.
• 15+ years of cloud engineering/infrastructure experience.
• 5+ years designing AWS enterprise-scale solutions.
• Deep AWS core services expertise.
• Kubernetes and Linux distributed systems experience.
• Experience leading architecture with influence across teams.
• Proven infra-as-code and CI/CD practices with Terraform.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead cloud engineering strategy, reference architectures, and standards for AWS infrastructure.
• Design scalable cloud solutions addressing regulatory, risk, and compliance requirements.
• Lead design of scalable, secure, cost-optimized cloud-native solutions on AWS.
• Drive root cause analysis and improve platform reliability and observability.
• Oversee infrastructure as code, automation, and CI/CD with Terraform and related tooling.
• Collaborate with Security, Risk, and Compliance on controls (PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FFIEC).
• Provide technical leadership for audits and ramp up audit readiness.
• Architect disaster recovery, high availability, and backup strategies.
• Define cloud security best practices: IAM, encryption, key management, secrets.

Skills

AWS core services

Cloud strategy

Terraform

CI/CD

Security & compliance

Disaster recovery

Observability

Audits & controls

Leadership

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

Responsibilities

• Defines and leads cloud engineering strategy, reference architectures, and technical standards for AWS-based infrastructure and platform capabilities.
• Design and implement scalable technical solutions that address regulatory, risk, and compliance requirements by integrating effective controls into cloud platforms and engineering practices.
• Leads the design of highly scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-optimized cloud-native solutions using AWS services such as EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, EKS, IAM, VPC, KMS, and related services.
• Solves the most complex infrastructure and platform problems, including issues that span multiple systems, teams, and technology layers.
• Leads root cause analysis for significant incidents, drives durable corrective actions, and improves platform reliability, resiliency, and operational readiness.
• Establishes enterprise patterns for infrastructure as code, automation, and CI/CD practices using tools such as Terraform and related delivery tooling.
• Partners with Security, Risk, and Compliance teams to design and maintain cloud controls that meet regulatory and policy requirements, including PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FFIEC, and other applicable standards.
• Provides technical leadership for internal and external audits by shaping control evidence approaches, addressing audit requests, and improving audit readiness.
• Architects disaster recovery, high availability, backup, and fault-tolerant strategies for critical cloud services and validates recovery approaches through testing and continuous improvement.
• Defines and enforces cloud security best practices including identity and access management, network segmentation, encryption, key management, secrets handling, and secure workload configuration.
• Drives cloud vulnerability management and configuration compliance strategies to ensure remediation, patching, and hardening practices meet service level expectations.
• Establishes cloud observability standards and leads implementation of logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting solutions to support complex transactional systems.
• Influences technical roadmaps, sequencing, and investment decisions across engineering teams to improve cloud adoption, operability, and platform consistency.
• Builds strong cross-functional relationships and serves as a trusted advisor to engineering leaders and senior stakeholders on cloud architecture, risk, tradeoffs, and long-term technical direction.
• Produces clear and durable technical documentation, standards, architecture artifacts, and guidance that enable scalable adoption across teams.
• Mentors engineers and technical leaders by raising engineering standards, sharing expertise, and guiding design and execution on high-impact initiatives.
• Supports the company’s commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.

Requirements

• Education and/or experience typically obtained through a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field.
• Typically has 15 years of experience or demonstrated portfolio consistent with experience required of the role in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or related technical roles.
• Typically has 5 years of experience or demonstrated portfolio consistent with experience required of the role designing and operating solutions in AWS at enterprise scale.
• 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.
• Demonstrated experience leading architecture and technical direction for large-scale, business-critical, cloud-based platforms or migrations.
• Demonstrated ability to influence engineers, architects, and leaders across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Strong experience establishing and scaling infrastructure as code practices using Terraform and related automation tooling.
• Strong knowledge of mature engineering practices including CI/CD, testing, secure engineering, operational readiness, and software delivery lifecycle disciplines.
• Proven experience implementing and governing security and compliance controls aligned with frameworks such as PCI-DSS, SOC 2, or FFIEC.
• Strong experience designing and operationalizing observability solutions for complex, high-availability transactional environments.
• Strong judgment in evaluating technical tradeoffs involving reliability, security, cost, speed, and maintainability.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• High level of customer responsiveness, strong documentation skills, attention to detail, and ability to prioritize effectively in ambiguous environments.
• Background and drug screen required.