Principal Engineer - Cloud

Early Warning® • Chicago, IL

2d • $173,000 - $276,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal Engineer - Cloud Engineering is a strategic individual contributor and technical leader responsible for defining and advancing Early Warning’s cloud engineering direction, architecture standards, and enterprise implementation approach. The role leads complex cloud engineering initiatives across teams and influences technical strategy for scalable, secure, resilient, and cost-effective cloud platforms.

The position partners with engineering, architecture, security, risk, compliance, and platform teams to enable high-performance cloud-native solutions and guide decisions as Early Warning migrates mission-critical applications and data from on-premise environments to AWS. The Principal Engineer sets technical patterns and guardrails and helps teams balance developer productivity, operational excellence, regulatory requirements, and long-term platform sustainability.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field, or equivalent experience typically obtained through that education.
• Typically 15 years of experience, or a demonstrated portfolio consistent with that experience, in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or related technical roles.
• Typically 5 years of experience, or a demonstrated portfolio consistent with that experience, designing and operating AWS solutions at enterprise scale.
• Deep expertise in AWS core services, including compute, storage, networking, identity, container orchestration, and managed data services.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, container platforms, Linux environments, and distributed systems design.
• Demonstrated experience leading architecture and technical direction for large-scale, business-critical cloud platforms or migrations.
• Ability to influence engineers, architects, and leaders across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Strong experience establishing and scaling infrastructure as code practices using Terraform and related automation tooling.
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD, testing, secure engineering, operational readiness, and software delivery lifecycle practices.
• Proven experience implementing and governing security and compliance controls aligned with frameworks such as PCI-DSS, SOC 2, or FFIEC.
• Strong experience designing and operationalizing observability solutions for complex, high-availability transactional environments.
• Strong judgment evaluating tradeoffs involving reliability, security, cost, speed, and maintainability.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including communicating complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• High customer responsiveness, strong documentation skills, attention to detail, and ability to prioritize in ambiguous environments.
• Must independently be eligible to work in the United States for any employer at the date of hire; the position is ineligible for employment visa sponsorship.
• Background and drug screen required.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in computer science, management information systems, or a related field.
• Current AWS certification(s) and/or other relevant cloud certifications.
• Experience leading large-scale cloud migration or modernization programs in regulated environments.
• Experience with policy-as-code, cloud governance frameworks, and developer enablement models that improve safe self-service adoption.
• Experience with monitoring and alerting platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Splunk, or AppDynamics.
• Experience with container and workload security technologies.
• Experience with programming or scripting languages such as Python, Java, C#, Ruby, or Shell.
• Knowledge of ACH/EFT and real-time payment networks, including RTP or FedNow.
• Experience in FinTech, banking, payments, or other highly regulated industries.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead cloud engineering strategy, reference architectures, and technical standards for AWS infrastructure and platform capabilities.
• Lead the design of scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-optimized cloud-native solutions using AWS services.
• Solve complex infrastructure and platform problems spanning systems, teams, and technology layers.
• Lead root cause analysis for significant incidents, drive corrective actions, and improve platform reliability, resiliency, and operational readiness.
• Establish enterprise patterns for infrastructure as code, automation, and CI/CD practices.
• Partner with Security, Risk, and Compliance teams to design and maintain cloud controls that meet regulatory and policy requirements, including PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and FFIEC.
• Provide technical leadership for internal and external audits, including control evidence approaches, audit requests, and audit readiness.
• Architect disaster recovery, high availability, backup, and fault-tolerant strategies for critical cloud services, and validate recovery approaches through testing and continuous improvement.
• Define and enforce cloud security practices for identity and access management, network segmentation, encryption, key management, secrets handling, and secure workload configuration.
• Drive cloud vulnerability management and configuration compliance strategies, including remediation, patching, and hardening practices.
• Establish cloud observability standards and lead implementation of logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting for complex transactional systems.
• Influence technical roadmaps, sequencing, and investment decisions across engineering teams to improve cloud adoption, operability, and platform consistency.
• Build cross-functional relationships and advise engineering leaders and senior stakeholders on cloud architecture, risk, tradeoffs, and long-term technical direction.
• Produce technical documentation, standards, architecture artifacts, and guidance that enable adoption across teams.
• Mentor engineers and technical leaders, raise engineering standards, share expertise, and guide high-impact design and execution.
• Support the company’s risk management commitment and protect the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.
• Perform other related duties as assigned by the supervisor.

Benefits

• Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans.
• Company contributions to a Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health, and dependent care expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on the first 6% deferred, immediately upon eligibility.
• Flexible Time Off for exempt employees and generous PTO for non-exempt employees.
• 11 paid company holidays.
• Paid volunteer day.
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Maven Family Planning support, including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.
• Eligibility for a discretionary incentive plan.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal