Principal Software Development Engineer
About The Position
Waters Corporation is seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer to lead CI/CD platform initiatives for its Global Software Engineering team. The role focuses on building the next generation of a platform supporting software development across life, materials, food, and environmental sciences. It combines hands-on engineering with strategic technical leadership in a hybrid-cloud and physical-instrument environment. The position is onsite three days per week in Milford, Massachusetts: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The engineer will design and evolve internal build platforms, primarily using Python, serving more than 65 active software projects. The platform is expected to support high volumes of jobs with clear reliability objectives, observability, and understandable failure modes. The role also owns platform APIs, command-line tools, and self-service workflows, while improving developer experience and reducing manual effort through automation. The position calls for a hands-on technical leader who can improve CI/CD practices, address hybrid-cloud and on-premises constraints, support hardware-constrained workflows, mentor engineers, establish engineering standards, and communicate technical strategies and trade-offs across teams and stakeholders.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- 10 or more years of DevOps or platform engineering experience, including operating systems at scale.
- Strong proficiency in Python and a deep understanding of object-oriented design and maintainable software architecture.
- Expert Git knowledge, including multi-repository and monorepository strategies, branching, and governance enforced by platforms.
- Advanced shell scripting skills in Bash and PowerShell, with fluency in Linux and Windows operating environments.
- Extensive experience designing, implementing, and scaling CI/CD pipelines, with demonstrated success improving release reliability and velocity across multiple teams.
- Track record managing large-scale systems with high availability and performance requirements.
- Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments.
- Demonstrated inclination to eliminate manual workflows through durable, tested automation.
- Proven ability to mentor engineers, influence architectural direction, and set standards across teams.
- Strong programming background and ability to design and deliver production-quality code.
Nice To Haves
- Experience supporting or integrating with physical instruments or hardware-constrained systems.
- Demonstrated technical leadership within software organizations, influencing direction and elevating team performance.
- Knowledge of multiple programming languages and build systems, and ability to select appropriate tools.
- Hands-on experience scaling platforms to manage very high volumes and concurrency reliably.
- Experience operating in enterprise software development environments while balancing agility and governance.
- Experience with configuration management frameworks such as Ansible, Puppet, or Chef.
- Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker, Lambda, and ECS.
- Experience developing large-scale, maintainable Python services and frameworks used across an organization.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and evolve internal build platforms, primarily in Python, serving more than 65 active software projects.
- Build and scale platform services that handle 10,000 or more jobs, with clear SLIs/SLOs, observability, and understandable failure modes.
- Own platform APIs, CLIs, and self-service workflows so teams can onboard, build, test, and release without tickets.
- Gather internal developer feedback, prioritize pain points, and improve developer experience.
- Implement and improve pipeline primitives, reusable templates, and release automation to raise quality and delivery cadence.
- Reduce manual work by encoding policies and workflows into the platform, creating guardrails as code, and eliminating tribal knowledge.
- Support horizontal integration across diverse development value streams through shared contracts, plugins, and extension points.
- Address hybrid-cloud and on-premises constraints with durable platform abstractions and reduce ticket-driven firefighting.
- Support physical-instrument and hardware-constrained workflows with purpose-built platform capabilities where needed.
- Design and ship production-quality code, using operations experience to inform architecture.
- Mentor engineers and elevate capabilities across the organization.
- Drive cross-functional collaboration and integration across systems, teams, and business functions.
- Establish and champion DevOps and platform engineering best practices, standards, and patterns.
- Communicate technical strategies and trade-offs clearly to engineers, leadership, and stakeholders.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
