Principal Engineer - Resiliency

Jeppesen ForeFlight Careers•Austin, TX

10d•$208,000 - $244,000•Hybrid

About The Position

ForeFlight is hiring a Principal Engineer focused on resiliency to define and advance reliability and recovery capabilities across its AWS estate. The role is preferred as hybrid in Austin, Houston, or Denver, with virtual work considered for the right candidate. The engineer will own the resiliency strategy and reference architecture, including service availability targets, standard multi-AZ and multi-region patterns, and decisions about active-active, active-passive, warm-standby, and pilot-light designs. The role leads business continuity and disaster recovery end to end, including setting RTO/RPO targets, automating regional failover, running recovery exercises and game days, maintaining runbooks, and turning findings into lasting architectural improvements. The role also drives resiliency across AWS container platforms and data services, builds resilience into infrastructure automation, and establishes reliability signals such as SLOs, error budgets, health checks, dependency maps, and blast-radius analyses. It leads availability incident response and resiliency-focused postmortems, while working with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to translate continuity requirements into validated AWS designs and recovery capabilities. Jeppesen ForeFlight provides aviation software solutions for commercial, business, military, and general aviation customers. The company describes its benefits as supporting employees’ physical, financial, and emotional wellbeing. The stated summary pay range is $208,000 to $244,000.

Requirements

12+ years of engineering experience, including at least 7 years as the primary architect or technical owner of infrastructure resiliency and high-availability architecture at scale.
Deep hands-on AWS production experience in large multi-account, multi-region environments, including VPC and networking design, Route 53, ALB/NLB, Global Accelerator, IAM, and account-boundary decisions affecting failover.
Demonstrated ownership of highly available architectures, with multi-AZ as the baseline and multi-region capability for critical workloads, and sound judgment about topology tradeoffs.
Track record owning BC/DR strategy end to end, including setting RTO/RPO targets, designing and automating regional failover, and conducting recovery exercises beyond tabletop reviews.
Expert command of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, particularly the Reliability pillar, including formal reviews and completion of resulting remediation.
Production experience with AWS container platforms (ECS/Fargate, EKS, or both), including scaling, placement and failure domains, deployment safety, and failure behavior.
Strong data-tier resiliency experience with Aurora or RDS, including multi-AZ, Global Database, failover behavior, and replica lag; plus experience with at least one of DynamoDB global tables, ElastiCache replication, or S3 cross-region replication.
Deep production experience designing and operating IaC at scale; Terraform preferred and CDK acceptable, with knowledge of module strategy, state management, and guardrail enforcement across accounts and environments.
Expert command of infrastructure CI/CD, including pipeline design, drift detection, plan/apply workflows, and safe self-service patterns.
Hands-on experience with chaos engineering and production fault injection, including failure-injection tooling and game-day operations.
Strong infrastructure observability expertise, including SLO and error-budget design, health-check strategy, dependency mapping, and state-of-the-fleet visibility.
Cross-functional leadership and ability to engage senior engineering, product, and finance leaders on availability, redundancy costs, and recovery capability.
Comfort working through coordination challenges in a recently combined company, including divergent AWS estates, consolidation, and organizational change.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with AWS resiliency tooling such as Resilience Hub, Route 53 Application Recovery Controller, Elastic Disaster Recovery, or Fault Injection Service.
AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification, or equivalent demonstrable depth.
Experience with infrastructure orchestration tools beyond raw Terraform, such as Terragrunt, Atlantis, Spacelift, env0, or Crossplane.
SRE or platform reliability background, with strong instincts for SLO design, error-budget policy, and toil reduction.
Experience modeling redundancy costs, including standby capacity, cross-region data transfer, and replication overhead, and explaining tradeoffs to business stakeholders.
Experience integrating infrastructure and resiliency practices across two or more legacy AWS estates after an M&A.
Experience in regulated industries or other domains with mission-critical workloads and strict continuity requirements.

Responsibilities

Own the resiliency strategy and reference architecture for the AWS estate, including availability targets by service tier and standard multi-AZ and multi-region patterns.
Establish the decision framework for active-active, active-passive, warm-standby, and pilot-light topologies, including cost, complexity, RTO/RPO, and migration tradeoffs.
Lead business continuity and disaster recovery end to end, including RTO/RPO target-setting, automated failover design, regular DR exercises and game days, recovery runbooks, and implementation of exercise findings.
Lead AWS Well-Architected Reviews focused on Reliability and Operational Excellence, and turn findings into a prioritized and tracked remediation backlog.
Drive resiliency across ECS/Fargate and EKS workloads, including placement, capacity headroom, failure-domain isolation, graceful degradation, and recovery during partial-region impairment.
Drive data-tier resiliency across Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, and S3, defining expectations for failover time, replica lag, and data-loss boundaries.
Encode resilience in automation through IaC-defined failover paths, self-healing and auto-remediation, drift detection, and continuous fault injection.
Own reliability signals for core infrastructure, including SLOs, error budgets, health checks, failover triggers, dependency mapping, and blast-radius analysis.
Improve incident response for availability events, lead resiliency-focused postmortems, and convert recurring failure modes into architectural fixes and platform guardrails.
Work across engineering, product, and business stakeholders to translate continuity and availability requirements into AWS designs and validated recovery capability.
Navigate organizational coordination associated with divergent AWS estates and in-flight consolidation.