Principal Engineer, Cloud Strategy Lead

Jobtailor

North Carolina

On-site

USD 180,000 - 240,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

Jobtailor in the United States seeks a Senior Principal Engineer to lead cloud tooling strategy across five CCOE teams and five Foundations pods. You will architect IaC standards, govern Terraform architectures, and operate a self-service infrastructure platform, including AFT and internal developer tools.

With 10+ years in tech and 5+ years in cloud/platform leadership, you will mentor senior engineers and participate in 24x7 on-call rotations in a security-conscious environment.

Qualifications

10+ years of progressive tech experience, incl. 5+ years in cloud/platform leadership.

Responsibilities

Set and evolve multi-year technical strategy for cloud tooling and developer experience across CCOE teams.
Define and govern Terraform code architecture standards.
Architect and operate the self-service infrastructure vending platform including Account Factory for Terraform (AFT) and Service Catalog.
Establish enterprise IaC quality standards: pre-commit, policy-as-code, security scanning, drift detection, automated remediation.
Act as primary liaison between CCOE and Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, and Application Engineering.
Drive engineering excellence across CCOE: code review standards, pairing, on-call quality, post-incident review.
Embed agentic AI capabilities into engineering practice and internal platforms for self-service.
Drive strategy for embedding agentic AI into self-service platform, including AI-enabled IaC generation and automated PR review.
Operate as a senior contributor with dotted-line leadership across CCOE teams and Foundations pods.
Mentor senior engineers, AVPs, VPs via code review, architecture guidance, and certification-path advice.
Participate in 24x7 on-call rotations as senior incident commander and escalation point.

Skills

cloud tooling

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform

AWS

GitHub Actions

policy-as-code

security scanning

drift detection

automated remediation

agentic AI

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Bachelor's degree in Engineering

Tools

Terraform Cloud

GitHub Actions

Job description

Responsibilities

Set and evolve the multi-year technical strategy for cloud tooling, IaC, and developer experience across all five CCOE teams (Foundations, Platforms, Containers, Support, Delivery) and the five Foundations pods (Security & Governance, FinOps, Functional Design Engineering & Strategy, Network Engineering, Monitoring).
Define and govern Terraform code architecture standards: module library curation, versioning, deprecation, contribution patterns, and module quality gates.
Architect and operate the self-service infrastructure vending platform, including Account Factory for Terraform (AFT), Service Catalog, golden paths, and Internal Developer Platform (Backstage-class) integration.
Establish enterprise standards for IaC quality: pre‑commit, policy‑as‑code (Sentinel / OPA), security and compliance scanning, drift detection, and automated remediation.
Act as the primary technical liaison between CCOE and Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, and Application Engineering.
Drive engineering excellence across CCOE: code review standards, pairing culture, on‑call quality, post‑incident review discipline, and continuous improvement of the developer experience.
Embed agentic AI capabilities into the team's engineering practice (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Bedrock, MCP servers, agentic IaC and review workflows) and into the platform's self‑service experience for internal customers.
Drive the technical strategy for embedding agentic AI capabilities into the self‑service platform: agentic IaC generation, automated PR review, MCP‑backed agents for internal data, and conversational interfaces that let internal customers self‑serve common requests.
Operate as a senior individual contributor with dotted‑line technical leadership to all five CCOE teams and the five Foundations pods — leading cloud strategy and technical architecture across the organization.
Mentor and uplift senior engineers, AVPs, and VPs across CCOE through code review, design partnership, technical pairing, architecture guidance, and certification‑path technical advice per the CCOE certification matrix — acting as a force multiplier without direct reports.
Personally participate in 24x7 on‑call rotations as senior incident commander and cross‑CCOE technical escalation point.

Requirements

10+ years of progressive technical experience including 5+ years in cloud infrastructure or platform engineering leadership.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline (or equivalent work experience).
5+ years of hands‑on production AWS at scale in a multi‑account landing zone, with 4+ years of authoring production Terraform in a private module ecosystem delivered through Terraform Cloud and GitHub Actions.
5+ years experience operating as a senior individual contributor (Principal Engineer or equivalent), influencing technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority — including hiring‑loop technical interviewing, architecture review participation, and technical mentorship of staff and senior engineers.
Experience leading and personally participating in 24x7 production on‑call rotations in a fast‑paced, security‑conscious, regulated environment (financial services strongly preferred).

Hard Skills