Principal Programmer Analyst

NextEra Energy•Palm Beach Gardens, FL

About The Position

NextEra Energy Resources is seeking a Principal IIoT Platform Engineer to provide technical leadership for the Industrial IoT infrastructure supporting a large renewable energy telemetry platform. The platform ingests telemetry from wind, solar, battery storage, and distributed generation facilities, processing more than 100 billion Industrial IoT events per day and delivering highly available data services for operational technology, enterprise analytics, AI, and business applications. This senior technical leader is responsible for the design, operation, and continual improvement of the Ignition, HiveMQ, and AWS infrastructure powering the Sequoia platform. The role leads architecture decisions within its domain, mentors engineers, establishes engineering standards, and addresses complex platform challenges in partnership with Principal Engineers and teams across the Sequoia ecosystem. The position encompasses enterprise Ignition infrastructure, highly available MQTT and HiveMQ services, AWS cloud-native infrastructure, infrastructure automation, platform reliability and operations, monitoring and observability, service management, and security. The engineer supports mission-critical 24x7 production operations and helps ensure the platform is secure, resilient, scalable, and operationally mature.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
10+ years designing, implementing, and supporting enterprise infrastructure.
7+ years administering enterprise Ignition environments.
7+ years supporting AWS production environments.
5+ years designing and operating enterprise MQTT platforms.
Experience implementing Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and/or AWS CloudFormation.
Experience supporting enterprise ServiceNow processes and integrations.
Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems.
Experience supporting 24x7 production environments.
Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and leading technical teams.
Experience supporting large-scale Industrial IoT or telemetry platforms.
Experience supporting platforms processing 100+ billion Industrial IoT events per day or equivalent hyperscale distributed systems.
Deep expertise with Ignition, HiveMQ, MQTT, Sparkplug B, and OPC UA.
Experience with enterprise monitoring platforms such as Amazon CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK/OpenSearch, as well as enterprise logging, metrics collection, alerting, capacity dashboards, and operational health monitoring.
Experience with automation and infrastructure tools and technologies including Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Python, PowerShell, Bash, Git, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code.
Working knowledge of Zero Trust principles, AWS IAM best practices, certificate lifecycle management, PKI, TLS, cybersecurity hardening, secrets management, least-privilege access, and industrial cybersecurity.
Technical skills include AWS services and technologies, Linux, Windows Server, Docker, Git, Python, PowerShell, Bash, and SQL.

Nice To Haves

Experience in renewable energy.
Experience in electric utility operations.
Experience in power generation.
Experience in industrial automation.
Experience in manufacturing.
Experience in enterprise cloud platform engineering.
AWS Solutions Architect – Professional certification.
AWS SysOps Administrator – Associate certification.
AWS Developer – Associate certification.
AWS Advanced Networking – Specialty certification.

Responsibilities

Serve as a senior technical leader for the Industrial IoT platform.
Lead architecture decisions for the Ignition, HiveMQ, and AWS technology stack.
Mentor engineers across multiple teams and foster technical excellence.
Establish engineering standards, operational best practices, and platform governance.
Review solution designs for scalability, resiliency, security, and maintainability.
Lead technical root cause analysis for critical production incidents.
Champion automation-first engineering practices.
Develop platform standards, documentation, and operational procedures.
Partner with Enterprise Architecture, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Operations, Data Engineering, and Application Development teams.
Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend improvements to the Industrial IoT platform.
Design enterprise Ignition architecture and platform deployments, including gateway installation, configuration, lifecycle management, upgrades, migrations, high availability, redundancy, Gateway Network architecture, EAM, backup and disaster recovery, performance, certificates, security, tag providers, historian integration, modules, capacity planning, and troubleshooting.
Design, implement, and support highly available HiveMQ and MQTT infrastructure, including clusters, replication, performance tuning, load balancing, persistence, store-and-forward, authentication and authorization, TLS, monitoring, capacity planning, disaster recovery, delivery troubleshooting, and Sparkplug B.
Design, deploy, automate, and support AWS cloud-native infrastructure using the specified AWS services.
Implement and maintain infrastructure with Terraform and/or AWS CloudFormation, keeping it automated, repeatable, version-controlled, and aligned with enterprise standards.
Design highly available and fault-tolerant architectures and eliminate single points of failure.
Improve platform resiliency and operational maturity; perform infrastructure capacity planning and optimize distributed-system performance.
Lead production incident response and develop disaster recovery strategies, operational runbooks, and engineering standards.
Improve platform monitoring and observability, including operational health monitoring, metrics, logging, alerting, and capacity dashboards.
Support 24x7 mission-critical production operations.
Support enterprise operational processes using ServiceNow, including incident management, change management, CMDB, asset management, operational workflows, and ITIL processes.
Apply security practices involving Zero Trust, AWS IAM, certificate lifecycle management, PKI, TLS, cybersecurity hardening, secrets management, least privilege, and industrial cybersecurity.
Lead architecture reviews and technical design sessions, coach engineers on complex distributed systems, influence technology strategy, build consensus across teams, serve as a senior escalation point, and foster knowledge sharing.