Principal Cloud Engineer

Title: Principal Cloud Engineer Location: Remote Target Start Date: ASAP Type: Direct Hire (D) Salary / Pay Rate: DOE Why Work Here This organization offers the chance to shape a cloud platform from the ground up, with real ownership over architecture, standards, and long-term direction rather than simply executing someone else's plan. It operates in a regulated, mission-driven space, giving the work a sense of purpose beyond typical infrastructure projects. The team culture blends technical depth with mentorship, so this role suits someone who enjoys staying hands-on while also growing engineers around them. There's genuine stability here, paired with meaningful investment in modern cloud practices and continued professional development. Leadership is looking for a long-term technical partner, not just a short-term hire, and is prepared to invest accordingly in the right person's growth and influence.

About the Role

This is a senior, player-coach leadership position responsible for the strategy, architecture, and day-to-day operation of a company's cloud infrastructure. The person in this role will guide a cloud engineering and DevOps team while remaining directly involved in building and maintaining production systems, writing infrastructure code, and troubleshooting live issues. It requires close collaboration with security, software engineering, and other technical stakeholders to ensure the platform is secure, scalable, and compliant with relevant industry standards. Beyond technical execution, this role also shapes the long-term roadmap for cloud investment, working with leadership on planning and budgeting decisions. It's an ideal fit for someone who enjoys both deep technical craft and the responsibility of building and developing a strong engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership for a cloud engineering and DevOps organization, setting direction, standards, and best practices while continuing to write and review production-level infrastructure code.
• Design, build, and operate a multi-account AWS environment using account-management and landing-zone frameworks, with a focus on high availability, security, scalability, and disaster recovery.
• Establish and evolve infrastructure-as-code standards, including module libraries, version control practices, and integration with automated deployment pipelines.
• Manage and extend container and compute platforms, including managed Kubernetes and container orchestration services, serverless functions, and virtual compute, along with the tooling that supports them.
• Architect secure, compliant cloud networking, including virtual private networks, hybrid connectivity to on-premises systems, and DNS and edge services.
• Own the CI/CD toolchain and developer platform, balancing delivery speed with required quality, security, and validation controls.
• Partner with security teams on identity and access management, encryption and secrets management, threat detection, configuration management, and remediation of security findings.
• Lead site reliability engineering practices, including defining service-level objectives, coordinating on-call and incident response, building observability into systems, and conducting capacity planning and disaster-recovery testing.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, product, and operations teams on cloud-native solution design, application onboarding, and migration efforts, providing architectural guidance along the way.
• Ensure cloud platforms and change-management practices align with relevant regulatory and quality frameworks, contributing to audits and validation activities as needed.
• Manage relationships with key technology vendors and serve as the senior technical voice in architecture and capacity planning discussions.
• Build and maintain a multi-year cloud platform roadmap in partnership with technology leadership, informing budgeting and investment decisions.
• Mentor, coach, and develop engineers on the team, including goal-setting, performance conversations, and support for career growth.
• Participate in hiring and onboarding of new team members.

Required Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience; a Master's degree is a plus.
• At least 10 years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, or DevOps.
• At least 7 years of hands-on experience with a major public cloud platform (AWS) across core compute, storage, database, networking, and security services.
• At least 3 years of people-leadership experience, including managing engineers, setting goals, and conducting performance revie