Principal Platform Engineer - DevOps & Release Automation

CGI•Fairfax, VA

12h•Onsite

About The Position

CGI is seeking a highly skilled Principal Platform Engineer - DevOps & Release Automation to join our Advantage Cloud Operations team and lead a strategic transformation of our build and release platform. This is a technical role focused on modernizing and optimizing our enterprise build and release pipeline supporting CGI Advantage, our flagship ERP platform. We are looking for a hands-on engineering leader who can assess the existing environment, identify bottlenecks and dependencies, redesign the pipeline architecture, and implement scalable automation strategies that improve release velocity, resiliency, and operational efficiency. This is not a traditional DevOps support role. The successful candidate will take ownership of a critical engineering initiative focused on reducing build times, improving deployment reliability, implementing automated rollback capabilities, and establishing a modern CI/CD foundation for CGI Advantage. The work performed in this role will have a direct impact on release quality, operational stability, and customer outcomes. The ideal candidate has successfully modernized complex build and deployment pipelines in enterprise environments and is comfortable operating as both an architect and a hands-on engineer. This position offers the opportunity to drive transformational change across the software delivery lifecycle while partnering with engineering, architecture, cloud operations, and product teams to establish modern DevOps best practices.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in software engineering, cloud engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or platform engineering environments
Minimum 5 years of hands-on experience designing, implementing, and supporting enterprise-scale CI/CD pipelines
Experience in rebuilding a slow, fragile pipeline and demonstrating measurable outcomes
Deep hands-on expertise in GitHub Actions (or equivalent); you write pipelines as production code, not YAML copy-paste
Strong grasp of dependency analysis – build graphs, artifact registries, incremental compilation, and test impact analysis
Proven experience designing automated rollback and blue-green or canary promotion strategies in a multi-tenant environment
Hands-on experience with Terraform, Kubernetes (AKS), and policy-as-code; you can trace a change from Git commit to running workload
Strong communication skills with the ability to clearly articulate technical trade-offs to engineering teams and leadership
Strong communication skills with the ability to influence technical teams and executive stakeholders
Experience with multi-tenant cloud environments
Familiarity with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices and operational excellence frameworks
Experience implementing Policy-as-Code solutions and cloud governance controls
Experience working in Agile and DevSecOps environments

Responsibilities

Audit the current pipeline – instrument every stage, identify bottlenecks, and produce a dependency map
Redesign the pipeline architecture – parallelization, incremental builds, caching, artifact promotion, and environment reproducibility
Deliver automated rollback – every promotion gate must be reversible without manual intervention
Build resilience into the pipeline – flaky-test isolation, retry policies, circuit breakers on external dependencies, and alerting when pipeline health degrades
Establish quality gates (unit, smoke, security scan, policy check) that block unsafe promotions without adding latency to the happy path
Document and hand off – every pattern, module, and decision is code-reviewed, tested, and transferable to the wider team