Principal Cloud Engineer

MESO SCALE DIAGNOSTICS, LLC.•Rockville, MD

3d•$131,600 - $205,625•Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal Cloud Engineer leads the design, build, operation, and continuous improvement of MSD’s AWS cloud platform across manufacturing, commercial, CRO, and SaaS business segments. This player-coach provides technical direction, establishes standards, and develops engineers while remaining hands-on in cloud architecture, infrastructure automation, delivery pipelines, and production 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 outcomes from MSD’s cloud investment. The position also owns the cloud platform roadmap and contributes to strategic planning, budgeting, vendor relationships, and capability investment decisions. The role supports cloud platforms and processes in a regulated environment, aligning them with FDA 21 CFR Part 11, GxP, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 expectations, and contributing to validation, audit, and assessment activities. The work is performed in a traditional office environment or a hybrid model.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
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 or ArgoCD.
Experience operating in regulated 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.
Proficiency in Python and Bash, plus 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 findings to closure.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs to executive audiences and external auditors and author architecture decision records, runbooks, post-mortems, and roadmap narratives.
Professional presence and interpersonal skills to interact courteously, promptly, and diplomatically with employees and stakeholders, and to influence consensus on cloud architecture, engineering standards, and platform adoption.
Creative, collaborative, proactive, and self-motivated approach to assigned accountabilities.
Ability to provide day-to-day guidance and mentoring in a consistently supportive and collaborative manner.
Continuous-learning mindset, tracking AWS service releases, emerging cloud-native patterns, platform-engineering practices, and relevant AI-assisted infrastructure tooling.
Strong critical thinking and sound judgment when handling ambiguous, cross-functional technical problems with competing priorities and regulatory constraints.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

Lead, mentor, and develop the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams; set technical direction and engineering standards, maintain 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 the Infrastructure-as-Code standard, including module libraries, state management, branching and review patterns, and CI/CD integration; use Terraform preferably, with CloudFormation and CDK as needed.
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, in alignment with security and compliance requirements.
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 across 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 defining SLOs/SLIs, on-call rotations and 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 relationships with AWS, infrastructure-as-code and platform-tooling vendors, and managed service providers; represent MSD as the senior technical voice in vendor architecture and capacity discussions.
Develop and own the cloud platform roadmap and partner with IS/IT leadership on multi-year planning, budgeting, and capability investment decisions.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision coverage, including prescription benefits.
401(k) plan with company matching.
Flexible spending accounts.
Company-paid short- and long-term disability insurance.
Group life and accidental death and dismemberment insurance.
Paid vacation, paid sick leave, and paid holidays.
Paid parental leave.
Employee assistance program.
Fitness club membership contribution.
Pet insurance.
Identity theft protection.
Home and auto insurance discounts.
Optional supplemental life insurance.
Employees may qualify for a discretionary or non-discretionary bonus in addition to base salary.