Principal Engineer - Cloud Engineering

Job Title: Principal Engineer - Cloud Engineering

Location: Onsite in Issaquah, WA - 5x / Week

Type: Direct Hire

Job Description:

The Cloud team is responsible for providing multi cloud infrastructure and the associated platforms, tools and services required to onboard applications into the cloud globally. The Foundational Engineering team architects, designs, and manages the implementation and configuration of our cloud platforms. The Cloud Express team is responsible for development of a zero-touch automated platform that deploys cloud infrastructure for value streams. The Cloud Onboarding team reviews value streams proposals and assigns priority to onboard applications to the cloud and provides feedback and recommendations for architecture, platforms and resources. The Cloud Automation Tools team is responsible for the tools leveraged to store and deploy infrastructure as code to build resources within our hybrid, multi-cloud platforms. It is essential that the solutions factor in a multi cloud environment and that requirements are gathered to clearly understand fit for purpose when designing or assisting with the solution. All of these functions leverage IaC best practices for implementation and configuration to maintain strong security posture, provide traceability and ensure consistency.

The Principal Engineer in Cloud holds a pivotal leadership role, steering the strategic vision, design, and architecture of the organization's multi cloud landscape across initiatives on Cloud. In this capacity, this role will be instrumental in shaping the long-term technical strategy, embracing innovation, and providing hands-on experience as a technical leader for the team; conducting research for emerging industry trends and providing ongoing guidance to bring that to fruition. This role demands a dynamic approach, blending direct technical guidance, mentorship, and active participation in risk and growth management. Collaboration with the cloud leadership team is integral, fostering a hands-on and collective effort towards achieving organizational goals.

Role & Responsibilities:

Leadership & Strategy

• Sets the strategic vision for multi cloud platform, aligning with organization goals. Provides leadership in guiding the overall direction of cloud technical initiatives.
• Stays up-to-date with emerging technologies and assess their applicability to the organization.
• Provides strategic insights and recommendations based on data to support decision-making at the organizational level
• Leads and mentors a team of engineers, provides technical guidance, sharing best practices, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth.
• Coaches and trains engineers on the team on what is possible through short term PoCs.
• Fosters a collaborative environment that encourages knowledge sharing and skill development. Leads technical leadership forums, lunch and learn sessions for the rest of the engineering community in the organization.
• Focuses on business needs through a data driven approach.

Architecture & Design

• Supports our architecture ecosystem by working with Enterprise Architecture, Solution Architects, System Architects, and Platform Architects to ensure security by design.
• Contributes to the design and architecture of our multi cloud network, ensuring it is highly available and scalable.
• Designs, develops, and optimizes cloud infrastructure for complex application architecture.
• Works on system design through well-defined interfaces across multiple components, code reviews, leveraging.
• Monitors the performance of cloud platforms and automation tools, provides technical leadership to drive stability and scalability of data products and reporting solutions and data/telemetry to make decisions.
• Establishes and enforces data quality standards and best practices. Implements processes for data validation, cleansing, and accuracy.

Engineering & Automation

• Adheres to and drives modern software engineering practices through design reviews.
• Develops “best-in-class” engineering for our services by ensuring that the services and the components are well-defined and modularized, secure, reliable, diagnosable, actively monitored, and reusable.
• Troubleshoots and optimizes automation, reliability, and monitoring for delivered products.
• Ensures testability, portability/monitoring, reliability, and maintainability; and understands when code is ready to be shared and delivered.
• Partners with engineering and development teams to create and maintain documentation for cloud platforms, CI/CD processes and onboarding application infrastructure into the Cloud.
• Implements measures to optimize performance and troubleshoot issues.

Collaboration & Communication

• Collaborates with cross-functional teams, including enterprise architecture, security and compliance, engineers, platforms engineers, and IT professionals, to develop comprehensive cloud solutions.
• Enforces network security policies and procedures to safeguard against cybersecurity threats and ensure compliance with regulations.
• Works closely with the Information Security team to ensure security policies and best practices are enforced in an effective and scalable manner.
• Ensures the integrity, security, and performance of cloud products and solutions by partnering with platforms, security, networking and governance teams.
• Recommends infrastructure upgrades to support business growth and evolving technology requirements.

Required Skills:

• Proven track record with at least 15 years of hands-on experience in multi cloud environments.
• 5 years’ experience in leadership or senior roles; demonstrating the ability to guide and lead a team effectively.
• 5 years’ experience working with Cloud and automation technologies, such as Azure, GCP, Git, ADO, Terraform and other technologies that facilitate technical implementation of DevOps.
• 5 years’ experience developing solutions on the cloud using any of the modern languages (Java, C#, Go)
• 5 years’ experience in security and compliance as it relates to cloud platforms, tools and services
• Demonstrated advanced proficiency in cloud platforms, automation tools, IaC languages and cloud architecture framework.
• Demonstrated proficiency in advanced networking technologies and concepts as it relates to multi cloud infrastructure
• Proficiency in data visualization tools, such as Tableau, Power BI or similar tools to communicate insights effectively.
• Proven expertise in working with cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, to architect and implement scalable and efficient cloud solutions
• In-depth understanding and practical application of cloud architecture principles, combining the best of hybrid and multi cloud environments, ensuring scalability, redundancy and high availability.
• Experience dealing with high-volume and high-velocity data streams, and designing systems that can handle the demands of real-time or near-real-time analytics.
• Experience in shaping the strategic vision for cloud and automation tools initiatives within an organization.
• Successful management of cloud projects, including planning, execution, and delivery.
• Demonstrated ability to drive innovation, adapt to emerging technologies, and implement industry best practices.
• Demonstrated ability to take ownership and responsibility of critical issues and conclude them to resolution.
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities.

Recommended Skills:

• Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline.
• Relevant industry certifications are a plus.
• Experience in retail, manufacturing, ecommerce, supply chain.