Principal Software Development Engineer – Platform & Infrastructure

Jobtailor; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor is seeking a Principal Cloud Platform Engineer to define the technical strategy for scalable cloud infrastructure on AWS. You will lead migration and platform adoption, drive containerization with Kubernetes/EKS, and contribute code and IaC via Terraform, CloudFormation, and Helm.

You will design resilient patterns, build CI/CD pipelines, advance SRE practices, manage capacity and cost, enforce security and compliance, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product and security

Qualifications

• 10+ years professional software engineering experience.
• AWS platform engineering with deep hands-on experience.
• Strong skills in containerization and Kubernetes at scale.
• Experience with IaC: Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm.
• Production code and platform automation in Go/Python/Java.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical strategy, roadmap, and standards for cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities.
• Lead migration and platform adoption efforts, including containerization and Kubernetes/EKS.
• Contribute production code and infrastructure as code using Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, platform services, and automation.
• Perform design and code reviews.
• Design scalable, resilient, and secure infrastructure patterns for microservices, data stores, caching, and messaging.
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines, release automation, testing strategies, and safe deployment practices.
• Drive SRE and observability practices, including SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, tracing, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post-mortems.
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and traffic engineering for high-scale workloads.
• Own and promote AWS cost optimization practices.
• Define and enforce platform standards, security controls, environment tagging, and operational excellence practices.
• Mentor and grow senior and mid-level engineers.
• Collaborate with product, security, platform, and operations stakeholders to align solutions with business and compliance requirements.

Skills

Leadership

Mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

Communication

Cloud platform engineering

Tools

Kubernetes/EKS

Terraform

CloudFormation

Helm

Spinnaker

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Job description

• Define the technical strategy, roadmap, and standards for cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities
• Lead migration and platform adoption efforts, including containerization and Kubernetes/EKS
• Contribute production code and infrastructure as code using Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, platform services, and automation
• Perform design and code reviews
• Design scalable, resilient, and secure infrastructure patterns for microservices, data stores, caching, and messaging
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines, release automation, testing strategies, and safe deployment practices
• Drive SRE and observability practices, including SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, tracing, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post-mortems
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and traffic engineering for high-scale workloads
• Own and promote AWS cost optimization practices
• Define and enforce platform standards, security controls, environment tagging, and operational excellence practices
• Mentor and grow senior and mid-level engineers
• Collaborate with product, security, platform, and operations stakeholders to align solutions with business and compliance requirements

Requirements

• 10+ years professional software engineering experience with significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed cloud services
• Strong, demonstrable experience building and running platforms on AWS, including EKS, ECS, EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, ELB/ALB, and Auto Scaling
• Deep hands-on experience with containerization and Kubernetes at scale
• Practical experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, and Helm charts
• Production coding and platform automation experience using Go, Python, Java, or similar
• Experience designing for resilience, observability, security, and operational automation
• Familiarity with Spinnaker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar CI/CD tooling
• Ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives and influence architectural decisions
• Strong communication skills and experience mentoring engineers
• Preferred: platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure leadership at scale
• Preferred: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, or Jaeger
• Preferred: AWS cost optimization strategies and tooling
• Preferred: service meshes, API gateways, and advanced networking patterns
• Preferred: cloud security/compliance, secrets management, and policy-as-code
• Preferred: experience migrating monoliths to cloud-native architectures

Core Competencies

Demonstrates expertise in defining technical strategies and roadmaps for cloud infrastructure, with a strong focus on AWS services, containerization, and infrastructure as code. Proven ability to lead cross-team initiatives, mentor engineers, and implement best practices for operational excellence and security.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• AWS Platform Engineering
• Kubernetes Containerization
• Infrastructure As Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• CI/CD Pipeline Development
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Hard Skills

• Cloud Infrastructure Design
• Production Coding (Go, Python, Java)
• Monitoring and Observability (Prometheus, Grafana)
• Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning
• Security and Compliance Practices

Soft Skills

• Strong Communication Skills
• Mentoring and Leadership

Industry Keywords

• Cloud Security
• Operational Excellence
• Microservices Architecture
• Cost Optimization Strategies
• API Gateways

Tools & Technologies

• Kubernetes/EKS
• Terraform
• CloudFormation
• Helm
• Spinnaker