Principal Cloud Engineer

MSD Careers•Rockville, MD

3d•$131,600 - $205,625•Hybrid

About The Position

This position leads the design, build, operation, and continuous improvement of MSD’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform across manufacturing, commercial, CRO, and SaaS business segments. The Principal Cloud Engineer operates as a player-coach, providing technical direction, establishing standards, and developing engineers while remaining hands-on in cloud architecture, infrastructure automation, delivery pipelines, and production workload support. The role leads the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams and partners with company stakeholders, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Systems, Software Engineering, the Methodical Mind product team, and the BAL CRO organization. It champions automation, secure-by-design infrastructure, GxP and 21 CFR Part 11 alignment, and measurable business outcomes from MSD’s cloud investment. The role is responsible for MSD’s multi-account AWS environment, Infrastructure-as-Code standards, container and compute platforms, cloud networking, CI/CD and developer-platform tooling, cloud security engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering practices. It provides architectural guidance for cloud-native solutions, application onboarding, and migrations; supports validation, audit, and assessment activities in regulated environments; manages strategic vendor relationships; and owns the cloud platform roadmap in partnership with IS/IT leadership. The position is performed in a traditional office environment or a hybrid model. The annual base salary ranges from $131,600 to $205,625. Employees may also qualify for a discretionary or non-discretionary bonus.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline; an equivalent combination of education and experience is considered.
At least 10 years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, or DevOps roles.
At least 7 years of hands-on AWS engineering experience across core services, including EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, VPC, IAM, KMS, CloudFront, API Gateway, Route 53, CloudWatch, and CloudTrail.
At least 3 years of demonstrated people-leadership experience managing engineers as direct reports or formal tech leads, setting goals, conducting performance reviews, and developing team capability.
Strong, demonstrable Infrastructure-as-Code experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, and/or AWS CDK at scale, including module design and reuse, state management, and CI-integrated workflows.
Deep experience operating containerized workloads on Amazon ECS and/or Amazon EKS (Kubernetes), including cluster lifecycle, autoscaling, ingress, service mesh, and platform tooling such as Helm, ArgoCD, or comparable tools.
Experience operating in regulated environments, such as FDA 21 CFR Part 11, GxP, ISO 13485, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, or comparable environments, and supporting validation, audit, or assessment activities.
Strong AWS networking knowledge, including VPC design, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, hybrid connectivity, DNS, edge services, and segmentation patterns.
Strong cloud security engineering knowledge, including IAM design at scale, KMS and secrets management, GuardDuty/Security Hub/AWS Config, vulnerability management, and enterprise SIEM integration.
Strong scripting and programming proficiency in Python and Bash, and working proficiency in at least one general-purpose language for platform tooling.
Working understanding of observability and SRE practices, including metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, on-call, incident response, blameless post-mortems, and disaster-recovery testing.
Working understanding of FinOps practices, including cost reporting, tagging governance, savings plans, reserved instances, and continuous cost optimization.
Familiarity with hybrid-cloud integration patterns connecting AWS with on-premises infrastructure such as Nutanix or VMware.
Security-first mindset, applying least-privilege and defense-in-depth principles and driving security findings to closure.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including explaining technical trade-offs to executive audiences and external auditors and authoring architecture decision records, runbooks, post-mortems, and roadmap narratives.
Professional presence and interpersonal skills to interact courteously, promptly, and diplomatically with employees and other stakeholders and to influence consensus on cloud architecture, engineering standards, and platform adoption.
Creative, collaborative, proactive, and self-motivated approach to completing assigned accountabilities.
Ability to provide day-to-day guidance and mentoring in a supportive, collaborative manner.
Continuous-learning mindset and ability to track relevant AWS releases, cloud-native patterns, platform-engineering practices, and AI-assisted infrastructure tooling.
Strong critical thinking and sound judgment in addressing ambiguous, cross-functional technical problems with competing priorities and regulatory constraints.
Ability to communicate and exchange information, use equipment necessary to perform the job, and move about the office and facilities.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree preferred.
Experience in life sciences, medical device, pharmaceutical, healthcare, or another regulated industry strongly preferred.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional and/or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional certifications strongly preferred.
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification is a plus.
Working proficiency in Go, Java, or TypeScript for platform tooling is preferred.

Responsibilities

Lead, mentor, and develop the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams; set technical direction and engineering standards, establish runbooks, conduct performance and career-development conversations, and recruit and onboard talent.
Architect, build, and operate MSD’s AWS environment across multiple accounts using AWS Organizations, Control Tower, and a landing-zone reference architecture, designing for high availability, security, scalability, and recoverability.
Remain hands-on by writing and reviewing production Terraform, authoring CI/CD pipelines, debugging production incidents, optimizing cluster and database performance, and contributing production code.
Own and evolve Infrastructure-as-Code standards, including module libraries, state management, branching and review patterns, and CI/CD integration.
Operate and extend container and compute platforms, including Amazon ECS, EKS/Kubernetes, EC2, Lambda, and serverless services, along with associated cluster-management, ingress, observability, and security tooling.
Design and operate cloud networking, including VPC, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, hybrid connectivity to on-premises Nutanix AHV and partner environments, Route 53, and edge services.
Own the CI/CD platform and developer-platform tooling to accelerate delivery while enforcing quality, security, and validation controls.
Partner with Cybersecurity on cloud security engineering, including IAM, KMS encryption, secrets management, GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, vulnerability management, and SIEM integration; lead remediation of cloud security findings.
Lead SRE practices, including SLOs/SLIs, on-call rotations, incident response, observability standards, capacity planning, and disaster-recovery testing.
Partner with Enterprise Systems, Software Engineering, Methodical Mind, and BAL Services teams on cloud-native solution design, application onboarding, and migration patterns; provide architectural guidance and design reviews.
Ensure cloud platforms, deployment processes, and change-control practices align with FDA 21 CFR Part 11, GxP, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 expectations; contribute to validation, audit, and assessment activities.
Manage strategic vendor relationships and serve as the senior technical voice in vendor architecture and capacity discussions.
Develop and own the cloud platform roadmap; partner with IS/IT leadership on multi-year planning, budgeting, and capability investment decisions.