Principal Cloud Engineer

MSD Careers•All, MD

3d•$116,600 - $177,800•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, operating as a player-coach who provides technical direction, sets standards, and develops engineers while remaining deeply hands-on in architecting cloud infrastructure, automating delivery pipelines, and supporting production workloads. The Principal Cloud Engineer leads the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams and partners closely with company stakeholders, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Systems, Software Engineering, the Methodical Mind product team, and the BAL CRO organization. The role champions automation, secure-by-design infrastructure, GxP and 21 CFR Part 11 alignment, and measurable business outcomes from MSD’s cloud investment.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or related discipline; equivalent combination of education and experience considered.
Minimum 10 years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, or DevOps roles.
Minimum 7 years of hands-on AWS engineering experience across core services (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, VPC, IAM, KMS, CloudFront, API Gateway, Route 53, CloudWatch, CloudTrail).
Minimum 3 years of demonstrated people-leadership experience: managing engineers (direct reports or formal tech leads), setting goals, conducting performance reviews, and developing team capability.
Strong, demonstrable Infrastructure-as-Code experience with Terraform (preferred), 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 (Helm, ArgoCD, or comparable).
Experience operating in regulated environments (FDA 21 CFR Part 11, GxP, ISO 13485, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, or comparable) and supporting validation, audit, or assessment activities.
Strong AWS networking knowledge: VPC design, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, hybrid connectivity, DNS, edge services, and segmentation patterns.
Strong cloud security engineering knowledge: IAM design at scale, KMS and secrets management, GuardDuty/Security Hub/AWS Config, vulnerability management, and integration with enterprise SIEM platforms (Wazuh, Splunk, Sentinel, or comparable).
Strong scripting and programming proficiency in Python and Bash; working proficiency in at least one general-purpose language for platform tooling (Go, Java, or TypeScript preferred).
Working understanding of observability and SRE practices: metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, on-call, incident response, blameless post-mortems, and disaster-recovery testing.
Working understanding of FinOps practices: cost reporting, tagging governance, savings plans, reserved instances, and continuous cost optimization.
Familiarity with hybrid-cloud integration patterns connecting AWS with on-premises infrastructure (Nutanix, VMware, or comparable).
Security-first mindset: treats security as an engineering discipline, applies least-privilege and defense-in-depth principles, and drives findings to closure.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to articulate technical trade-offs to executive audiences and external auditors and to author architecture decision records, runbooks, post-mortems, and roadmap narratives.
A professional presence and strong interpersonal skills for interacting in a courteous, timely, and diplomatic manner with all levels of employees as well as other parties/stakeholders involved in the company to influence and drive consensus on cloud architecture, engineering standards, and platform adoption.
Demonstrated propensity to be creative, collaborative, proactive, and self-motivated in the execution and completion of assigned accountabilities.
Ability to provide day to day guidance/mentoring to others in a consistently supportive and collaborative approach.
Continuous-learning mindset; tracks AWS service releases, emerging cloud-native patterns, platform-engineering practices, and AI-assisted infrastructure tooling relevant to MSD’s roadmap.
Strong critical thinking and sound judgment in handling ambiguous, cross-functional technical problems with competing priorities and regulatory constraints.

Nice To Haves

Master’s preferred.
Experience in life sciences, medical device, pharmaceutical, healthcare, or other regulated industries strongly preferred.
AWS certifications strongly preferred: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional and/or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional; Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) is a plus.

Responsibilities

Lead, mentor, and develop the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams: set technical direction, establish engineering standards and runbooks, conduct performance management and career development conversations, and recruit and onboard new talent.
Architect, build, and operate MSD’s AWS environment across multiple accounts using AWS Organizations, Control Tower, and a landing-zone reference architecture; design for high availability, security, scalability, and recoverability.
Stay deeply hands-on: write and review production Terraform, author CI/CD pipelines, debug production incidents, optimize cluster and database performance, and contribute code that the team will live with for years.
Own and evolve MSD’s Infrastructure-as-Code standard (Terraform preferred; CloudFormation and CDK as needed), including module libraries, state management, branching and review patterns, and integration with CI/CD.
Operate and extend MSD’s container and compute platforms (Amazon ECS, EKS/Kubernetes, EC2, Lambda, and serverless services) and the cluster-management, ingress, observability, and security tooling around them.
Design and operate MSD’s cloud networking foundation — VPC, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, hybrid connectivity to on-prem (Nutanix AHV) and partner environments, Route 53, and edge services — in alignment with security and compliance requirements.
Own the CI/CD platform (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or comparable) and the developer-platform tooling that accelerates delivery while enforcing required quality, security, and validation controls.
Partner with Cybersecurity on cloud security engineering: IAM, KMS encryption, secrets management, GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, vulnerability management, and SIEM (SIEMonster/Wazuh) integration; lead remediation of cloud security findings.
Lead Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices: define SLOs/SLIs, on-call rotations and incident response, observability standards (CloudWatch, CloudTrail, OpenSearch, Prometheus/Grafana, distributed tracing), 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.
Support MSD’s regulated environment: 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 (AWS, IaC and platform tooling vendors, managed service providers) 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.