Principal Engineer II

Western Alliance Bank•Phoenix, AZ

About The Position

As a Principal Engineer II, you’ll be responsible for enabling scalable, secure, and governed data solutions across the organization. This role focuses on platform reliability, performance, automation, and enablement of data engineering teams, rather than application-specific development. You will collaborate with architects, data engineers, governance teams, and business stakeholders to implement cloud-first platform design patterns, automation frameworks, and operational best practices, while ensuring strong alignment with enterprise standards. As Principal Engineer II, you'll provide your expert-level knowledge as the established authority in your domain as well as extensive knowledge across multiple domains to ensure solutions are safe, secure, compliant and reliable. You'll lead large and complex design efforts supporting critical projects and solutions while engaging with project and business sponsors defining requirements and objectives of targeted solutions. As a Principal Engineer II, you'll also engage in the facilitation of dialogue and large team activities, while ensuring collaboration to include teams outside of your domain. You'll develop effective presentations and narratives for business stakeholders and IT audiences. Design transaction specific application performance monitoring metrics that can be captured and passed to business partners. In Addition, will layout reference architecture and visual diagrams that capture work. Build, configure, and manage enterprise data platform services across Azure, Informatica and Microsoft Fabric environments. Own platform availability, reliability, and performance, including monitoring, alerting, and incident response. Implement backup, recovery, and failover strategies to ensure business continuity. Manage capacity planning, cost optimization, and workload isolation strategies. Implement and manage access controls, RBAC, AD groups, and secure connectivity (Private Link, VNet, Gateways). Ensure platform compliance with enterprise governance, regulatory standards, and audit requirements. Define and implement platform-level monitoring, telemetry, and observability frameworks. Create and maintain architecture diagrams, runbooks, and operational documentation. Support production operations through incident triage, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement. Build the solution design of efforts that can be handed off to lower-level engineers for execution assuring reuse of platforms where possible. Review technical plans developed by lower-level engineers and analysts to assure quality designs which can support the volumetrics of our business partners objectives. Build comprehensive measurement dashboards that give performance insight into key applications of the bank which can feed operational results of our business partners while enforcing IT standards, and may modify or build procedures that support areas of operations across IT. Work independently or partner with architecture team counterparts to lay out the final documentation required for proper, ongoing reference of the given solution to include physical and logical layouts with cross reference to use case models.

Requirements

10+ years of related experience.
Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related IT degree.
Expertise in Microsoft Azure & Microsoft Fabric, including Fabric Lakehouse, Warehouse, Workspaces, Capacity management, Azure Data Factory (ADF), Synapse Analytics, Azure SQL, Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), Key Vault, Azure Monitor.
Expertise in data governance tools MS Purview and Informatica (IDMC).
Expertise in data cataloging, lineage, and quality tools Informatica and MS Purview.
Experience with Platform provisioning & automation (ARM, Terraform, YAML pipelines).
Experience with CI/CD using Azure DevOps.
Experience with Monitoring & observability frameworks.
Experience with Security & access management (RBAC, Managed Identity, Service Principals).
Working knowledge of data engineering frameworks and data lifecycle concepts.
Working knowledge of Fabric capacities, workspace configurations, and environment isolation.
Working knowledge of Data security, compliance, and governance frameworks.
Advanced to expert knowledge of applicable regulatory and legal compliance obligations, rules and regulations, industry standards and practices.
Advanced to expert experience in leading cross-functional teams and managing multiple projects simultaneously.
Established expertise in one or more key domains of the bank (Deposits, Loans, Operations or Reporting) with the ability to walk-through top-level process design.
Capable of working with regulatory partners like the CFPB, OCC and FRB through audits and collaboration efforts.
Advanced to expert familiarity with the capability model across IT and the applications and infrastructures available for engagement in solutioning across the bank.
Experience in the design, enhancement and compliance to all governance frameworks across the IT organization.
Expert speaking and writing communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Masters or MBA in related field preferred.
Previous leadership experience preferred.
Advanced knowledge of general Financial Services or Banking is preferred.

Responsibilities

Enable scalable, secure, and governed data solutions across the organization.
Focus on platform reliability, performance, automation, and enablement of data engineering teams.
Collaborate with architects, data engineers, governance teams, and business stakeholders to implement cloud-first platform design patterns, automation frameworks, and operational best practices.
Provide expert-level knowledge as the established authority in your domain and extensive knowledge across multiple domains.
Lead large and complex design efforts supporting critical projects and solutions.
Engage with project and business sponsors defining requirements and objectives of targeted solutions.
Facilitate dialogue and large team activities, ensuring collaboration across domains.
Develop effective presentations and narratives for business stakeholders and IT audiences.
Design transaction-specific application performance monitoring metrics.
Layout reference architecture and visual diagrams.
Build, configure, and manage enterprise data platform services across Azure, Informatica and Microsoft Fabric environments.
Own platform availability, reliability, and performance, including monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
Implement backup, recovery, and failover strategies.
Manage capacity planning, cost optimization, and workload isolation strategies.
Implement and manage access controls, RBAC, AD groups, and secure connectivity.
Ensure platform compliance with enterprise governance, regulatory standards, and audit requirements.
Define and implement platform-level monitoring, telemetry, and observability frameworks.
Create and maintain architecture diagrams, runbooks, and operational documentation.
Support production operations through incident triage, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
Build solution designs that can be handed off to lower-level engineers for execution.
Review technical plans developed by lower-level engineers and analysts.
Build comprehensive measurement dashboards for performance insight into key applications.
Modify or build procedures that support areas of operations across IT.
Work independently or partner with architecture team counterparts to lay out final documentation for solutions.

Benefits

Competitive salaries
An ownership stake in the company
Medical and dental insurance
Time off
A great 401k matching program
Tuition assistance program
An employee volunteer program
A wellness program
Opportunity to bolster business knowledge
Learning the ins and outs of how successful companies operate and manage their finances