Principal, Platform Engineering

OCC • Chicago, IL

23h • $174,900 - $292,300 • Hybrid

About The Position

This is a senior individual contributor role responsible for personally driving reliability, observability, and cloud platform engineering excellence across a large, complex cloud-based computing environment. The ideal candidate is a hands-on, data-driven technical expert, who can personally raise the bar on SRE and observability practices, reduce waste, optimize cloud efficiency, and improve performance, in close partnership with a dedicated SRE/monitoring team and a centralized architecture function. This individual will operate as a deep technical expert and thought leader, influencing and mentoring across teams without formal supervisory authority, while keeping a steady eye on the extensive regulatory/compliance demands on our company (e.g., CIS, NIST).

Requirements

• 10+ years of progressive, hands-on experience in software engineering with an understanding of large-scale computing solutions (primarily AWS), including software design and development, database architectures, IP networking, security, cloud operations, and performance tuning
• Demonstrated, hands-on expertise building and maturing SRE and observability practices at scale, able to personally raise the technical bar for a dedicated SRE/monitoring team, not just consume their output
• Demonstrated track record driving reliability through a data-driven culture, waste/toil reduction, cloud efficiency measures, and performance optimization, treating metrics as the primary lens for every decision
• Experience defining, instrumenting, and acting on software delivery performance metrics (DORA metrics, cycle time, deployment frequency, lead time, etc.) to drive engineering improvement initiatives
• Strong consultative, communication, and analytical skills, with the ability to regularly interact between various teams distributed across the US
• Strong technical influence and informal mentorship skills, with a track record of raising the technical bar across teams without formal management authority
• Relevant experience personally driving the adoption of new technologies while maintaining highly available, mission-critical systems, with a proven track record of success
• Ability to clearly communicate verbally and in writing to business and technology leaders, architects, developers, and team members
• Must be able to collaborate effectively with a group of high-performing, technical individuals
• Experience acting as a product owner, defining roadmap, requirements, and priorities, for a platform capability such as observability, ideally in partnership with a separate team that owns the underlying tooling and operations
• Experience with architecting, implementing, and maintaining highly available mission-critical environments for 24x7 availability
• Demonstrated history of working within deadlines and ability to work well under pressure
• Deep, hands-on mastery of observability tooling and practices (metrics, distributed tracing, centralized logging, dashboards, alerting), e.g., Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, CloudWatch, or equivalent, sufficient to elevate, not just consume, a dedicated SRE team’s capability
• Deep understanding of SRE principles including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, and postmortem culture, with a track record of driving adoption and maturity
• Hands-on experience with: Terraform, Kubernetes, Jenkins or other CI/CD tooling, Kafka, Github, and configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, or Ansible
• Deep, hands-on expertise with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools and practices (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, Pulumi), with a track record of driving IaC adoption at scale across a cloud platform organization
• Relevant experience with configuration and implementation of IaaS, Infrastructure as Code, AWS, Azure, etc.
• Expert working knowledge of infrastructure design and components, such as servers, operating systems, networks, and storage
• Basic understanding of good delivery practices and continual integration and improvement; Agile/Lean background for projects and project delivery
• Bachelor’s degree, preferably in a technical discipline (Computer Science, Mathematics, etc.), or equivalent combination of education and experience required; Master’s degree and relevant experience also considered
• 10+ years’ hands-on experience in IT systems installation, operations, administration, and maintenance of cloud systems / virtualized servers, with demonstrated depth as a senior technical individual contributor
• AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification or higher strongly desired

Nice To Haves

• Experience working within Agile methodology/scrum desired
• Comfort with ambiguity and demonstrated ability to drive complex programs in a decentralized environment
• Experience working in an environment with a defined production change control process; experience working with audits and compliance or in a regulated environment a plus
• Experience in organizations with a mature, centralized SRE function, avoiding role/scope overlap
• Familiarity with engineering metrics/analytics platforms (e.g., LinearB, Jellyfish, Sleuth, Haystack, or internal equivalents) used to track DORA metrics and delivery performance
• Competent in all phases of application development and implementation, including SDLC; hands-on scripting/development skills in Python, Ruby, Go, Java, etc. in a corporate environment strongly desired
• Experience establishing IaC governance and standards (module libraries, policy-as-code, drift detection) across multiple teams or business units
• Experience building a metrics-driven engineering culture, including scorecards, dashboards, or leadership reporting on delivery performance
• Experience working in a financial services or highly regulated environment preferred
• Relevant industry certifications such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud

Responsibilities

• Bring deep, hands-on SRE and observability expertise to Platform Engineering, personally elevating the maturity, rigor, and technical depth of the organization’s observability, monitoring, and reliability practices in close partnership with the dedicated SRE and monitoring team
• Serve as a technical authority on reliability engineering, mentoring engineers and managers informally and raising the bar on SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident response, and postmortem discipline across the platform organization
• Act as product owner for observability within the platform organization, defining the roadmap and requirements for observability capabilities while the dedicated SRE and monitoring team retains ownership of the underlying tooling and operations
• Own and drive platform engineering delivery and reliability metrics, including DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, MTTR), cycle time, and throughput, holding the organization accountable to continuous improvement
• Drive reliability across four core pillars: a data-driven culture that uses telemetry and metrics, not intuition, to make decisions; waste reduction through elimination of toil and inefficient processes; cloud measures such as utilization, rightsizing, and FinOps metrics; and continuous performance optimization
• Translate reliability signals (SLOs, error budgets, incident learnings) surfaced by the SRE organization into concrete cloud platform investments and roadmap priorities
• Personally drive results in the cloud platform by building a reliable, scalable, secure technology stack in collaboration with engineers and leaders, using leading industry practices
• Champion infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices across the cloud platform, ensuring provisioning, configuration, and environment management are automated, version-controlled, and consistently applied
• Assess and plan for capacity needs within the cloud platform and forecast accordingly
• Drive initiatives within your assigned area of responsibility with accountability for results and compliance with all controls and security requirements
• Lead in the development of technology roadmaps and end-of-life technology plans
• Effectively communicate project and operational service issues to senior management promptly with observations, decisions, and recommendations for corrective measures
• Participate in the implementation of production changes during defined maintenance windows and support on-call rotation
• Serve as a point of escalation for reliability, observability, and platform support issues
• Foster an atmosphere of trust, respect, and high performance while displaying strong ethics and integrity
• Plan and prioritize daily work and project tasks, meeting deadlines while maintaining a high quality of work
• Ensure personal compliance with all appropriate OCC policies and procedures, and support corrective actions to address audit and other regulatory or compliance findings
• Write and maintain documentation of relevant systems, procedures, and processes
• Other duties as assigned

Benefits

• A hybrid work environment, up to 2 days per week of remote work
• Tuition Reimbursement to support your continued education
• Student Loan Repayment Assistance
• Technology Stipend allowing you to use the device of your choice to connect to our network while working remotely
• Generous PTO and Parental leave
• 401k Employer Match
• Competitive health benefits including medical, dental and vision

What This Job Offers

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