Principal CloudOps Engineer

Vertafore•Denver, CO

9d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal Cloud Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for designing, advancing, and governing AWS platforms that support Vertafore’s B2B SaaS products. The role combines AWS expertise with architecture leadership, automation, reliability engineering, security, observability, and cloud financial management. It addresses complex infrastructure challenges across products and teams, establishes reusable engineering standards, and influences technical direction through expertise rather than organizational authority. The position partners with FinOps, Site Reliability Engineering, SRE Architects, Security Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, Development teams, and Cloud Operations to deliver reliable, secure, scalable, supportable, and financially sustainable cloud solutions. It provides technical leadership on AWS architecture and operations, cloud migrations and modernization, reliability and incident response, infrastructure automation, security controls, and cost optimization. The role also mentors engineers and develops documentation, standards, reference architectures, and operational practices. The position is based at an office location and requires travel up to 10% of the time. Physical requirements include occasional lifting or moving of up to 10 pounds, frequent repetitive hand and arm movements to operate a computer, close vision for computer work, and frequent sitting and/or standing. The selected candidate must be legally authorized to work in the United States and must complete preemployment drug and background screenings.

Requirements

12 or more years of experience in cloud or infrastructure engineering.
7 or more years of deep, hands-on AWS engineering experience supporting large-scale, highly available production environments.
Demonstrated experience designing and operating AWS environments supporting business-critical B2B SaaS or comparable enterprise applications.
Strong experience with enterprise AWS architecture, multi-account environments, networking, IAM, compute, storage, databases, observability, and security.
Advanced knowledge of AWS networking, including VPCs, routing, load balancing, DNS, security groups, private connectivity, and hybrid networking.
Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience using Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, or equivalent technologies.
Strong automation and scripting skills using Python, PowerShell, Bash, or comparable languages.
Strong Linux and/or Windows production systems experience.
Experience with backup, disaster recovery, resilience engineering, and high-severity incident response.
Experience troubleshooting complex infrastructure, application, network, storage, and performance issues.
Understanding of cloud financial management and AWS cost optimization.
Demonstrated ability to collaborate with SRE, architecture, security, development, operations, and FinOps teams.
Ability to influence technical decisions across teams without direct organizational authority.
Strong written and verbal communication skills with engineers, architects, product teams, and senior leadership.

Responsibilities

Design and implement highly available, resilient, scalable, secure, and cost-effective AWS architectures for enterprise SaaS applications.
Serve as a senior technical authority for AWS infrastructure, platform engineering, and cloud operations.
Define reference architectures, engineering standards, and reusable infrastructure patterns across accounts, products, and environments.
Lead technical design and implementation for cloud migrations, modernization initiatives, and major platform changes.
Evaluate architectures for reliability, performance, scalability, security, maintainability, operational complexity, and cost.
Partner with SRE and SRE Architects on availability, resilience, service-level objectives, observability, capacity, failure-mode analysis, incident prevention, and disaster recovery.
Work with FinOps to incorporate cost, licensing, utilization, forecasting, and optimization into architecture decisions.
Partner with Security Engineering to implement secure-by-default designs, scalable controls, governance, IAM, encryption, segmentation, logging, and preventative guardrails.
Collaborate with Enterprise Architecture to align cloud standards with technology strategy, modernization objectives, and architectural principles.
Work with Development teams to understand application requirements, remove infrastructure barriers, improve runtime architectures, and troubleshoot complex production issues.
Lead architecture and design reviews involving multiple technical disciplines and drive decisions to closure when requirements or priorities conflict.
Design systems for fault isolation, automated recovery, graceful degradation, backup, and disaster recovery.
Identify and eliminate single points of failure and systemic operational risks.
Participate in major production incidents and lead cloud infrastructure investigations requiring deep technical expertise.
Use incidents and postmortems to drive permanent, systemic improvements.
Establish standards for monitoring, metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and infrastructure telemetry.
Diagnose complex performance issues across compute, networking, storage, databases, and applications.
Develop capacity-planning approaches and identify scaling limitations before they affect customers.
Establish Infrastructure-as-Code as the standard for provisioning and managing AWS infrastructure.
Develop reusable Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, or equivalent modules and patterns.
Integrate infrastructure deployment, validation, security, and governance into CI/CD workflows.
Automate provisioning, configuration, patching, scaling, recovery, lifecycle management, and operational tasks.
Reduce manual work and improve repeatability, auditability, and deployment safety.
Translate security and compliance requirements into practical engineering controls and design using least privilege, defense in depth, and secure-by-default principles.
Support vulnerability remediation and compliance frameworks applicable to enterprise SaaS environments.
Incorporate AWS cost management into architecture and engineering decisions, identify waste, improve utilization, and help technical teams understand the financial impact of architectural decisions.
Act as an escalation point for the organization’s most complex AWS infrastructure problems.
Lead technical design reviews and challenge architectures that introduce unnecessary reliability, security, cost, or operational risk.
Influence technical direction across Cloud Operations, SRE, Security, Architecture, FinOps, and Development.
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers and raise engineering standards across the organization.
Develop documentation, standards, reference architectures, and operational practices.
Promote strong ownership, disciplined troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, automation, and operational excellence.