DevOps

H&R Block•Blue Springs, MO

12h

About The Position

As a Principal Engineer, you will be a senior technical leader operating horizontally across multiple teams and platforms. You will serve as a high‑impact individual contributor focused on elevating engineering practices, strengthening operational reliability, and enabling teams to deliver scalable, maintainable, and observable solutions. You will influence technical direction and architectural decisions across initiatives, guide teams through complex technical challenges, and partner closely with Product, Engineering, Architecture, and Platform leaders to translate business needs into sustainable technical approaches. This role emphasizes how engineering work is done—design quality, operational readiness, consistency, and long‑term system health—rather than ownership of a single product or domain.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in a related field or the equivalent combination of education and relevant work experience.
12+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, systems design, or related technical roles.
Strong experience with the Microsoft technology ecosystem, including modern .NET‑based services and Angular or comparable frontend frameworks.
Hands‑on experience designing, deploying, and operating cloud‑based solutions with an emphasis on scalable, secure, and resilient architectures.
Experience building and supporting containerized workloads using Kubernetes, including platforms such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or equivalent.
Familiarity with cloud‑native and DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and automated testing strategies.
Demonstrated experience operating at enterprise scale and influencing architecture and technical direction beyond a single team.
Deep technical expertise with the ability to connect business strategy to sustainable technology solutions.
Strong system design and architectural skills, with a focus on scalability, reliability, operability, and long‑term maintainability.
Proven ability to influence without direct authority and drive organization‑wide alignment on engineering and operational practices.
Experience mentoring engineers and serving as a role model for technical excellence.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
Broad technical perspective and willingness to contribute beyond a single area of specialization.

Nice To Haves

Experience with modern observability practices, including monitoring, logging, tracing, and using operational signals to guide system improvements.
Exposure to AI‑enabled solutions or applied machine learning, including evaluating where such capabilities add meaningful business value.
Experience supporting high‑availability, high‑volume, or transaction‑heavy systems in production environments.
A track record of contributing to engineering culture, communities of practice, or cross‑team technical initiatives.
Experience guiding teams through architectural modernization and platform evolution while managing and reducing long‑term technical debt.

Responsibilities

Define and influence technical strategy and architecture across multiple teams and platforms.
Collaborate with Product Owners to ensure Epics and initiatives clearly capture business intent, technical outcomes, and operational considerations.
Lead design discussions and proofs of concept (POCs) to evaluate solution options and architectural trade‑offs.
Break down complex business and technical problems into practical, scalable, and supportable solution approaches.
Guide teams in resolving highly complex, ambiguous, or cross‑cutting technical challenges.
Ensure consistent implementation of architectural standards, frameworks, conventions, and engineering best practices.
Drive alignment in system design, testing strategies, quality practices, and operational readiness across teams.
Foster a strong culture of observability, operational excellence, and data‑driven decision making.
Actively engage in incident response, production issue resolution, and post‑incident reviews, with a focus on systemic improvements and resilience.
Partner with platform, infrastructure, and SRE teams to improve system reliability, availability, and performance.
Evaluate and guide adoption of new technologies, tools, and design patterns aligned with enterprise standards and long‑term needs.
Anticipate future use cases and guide design decisions that minimize long‑term cost of change.
Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, elevating technical judgment, system thinking, and operational awareness.
Identify and address cross‑team friction in tools, processes, or architectural approaches to improve engineering effectiveness at scale.