Senior Distinguished Engineer

Early Warning® • Chicago, IL

1d • $248,000 - $330,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Distinguished Engineer – Cloud Services is the company’s foremost technical authority for enterprise cloud services and cloud-native platform capabilities. This leader is responsible for defining the strategy, architecture, engineering standards, and long-term technical direction for the managed services that application teams consume across the enterprise. Unlike traditional infrastructure engineering roles, this position focuses on the services built on top of the cloud foundation—not the underlying cloud infrastructure itself. The role drives simplification, standardization, automation, and self-service while enabling engineering teams to build secure, resilient, and scalable applications with minimal operational overhead. This individual partners closely with Cloud Infrastructure Engineering, Security, Platform Engineering, Architecture, and Product Engineering to ensure cloud services are delivered as reusable enterprise capabilities. This position functions as a strategic individual contributor expected to solve enterprise-wide engineering problems in a fast-paced and collaborative environment.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems, Information Technology, Information Systems, Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.
• Minimum 15 or more years of progressive software engineering experience; recognized as a technical expert with demonstrated experience mentoring and leading large-scale deliverables and processes in a Technology organization
• Minimum 5 or more years of software engineering experience dealing with large scale systems in the cloud.
• Minimum 5 or more years of experience implementing application solutions/ services in Cloud using Containerization, CI/CD, Automated testing and in compliance security guidelines.
• Recognized in the industry as a technical expert in their field through published works, patents and/or industry speaking engagements.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership through large-scale system designs, upgrades, and releases.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and energize people showcasing technical and leadership skills.
• Demonstrated experience with state- of- the- art technology, architecture, and design concepts, open-source operating systems, database systems, computer networking, and security.
• Possesses a deep understanding of executing highly scalable, distributed applications in cloud environments.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively in cross-functional groups and generate results.
• Excellent interpersonal, oral, and written communication skills.
• Must convey responsiveness and competence when dealing with internal customers, staff, peers, senior management, and vendors.
• Superior leadership presence with strong business acumen.
• Background and drug screen

Nice To Haves

• Master’s Degree; additional related education and/or related work experience preferred.
• Industry authored content around applicable area of expertise.
• Experience with large-scale enterprises scaling out operations in Amazon Web Services is highly favorable.
• Functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straight-forward solutions.
• Experience; with migrating application & data services from on-prem to Cloud.
• Deep hands-on technical expertise in at least one major technical area: large scale full stack development, building complex distributed systems, designing massive global networks.

Responsibilities

• Serves as a recognized senior technical individual contributor supporting our most demanding, cross-functional projects across the pillar.
• A visionary leader, builder, and an operator.
• Drives best practices, architectures, and technology decisions inside the tech function (as applicable) and the organization
• Define the long-term technical vision for enterprise cloud services.
• Establish the cloud services roadmap aligned with business priorities.
• Evaluate emerging cloud capabilities and determine enterprise adoption strategies.
• Create service standards that balance developer experience, security, operational excellence, and cost.
• Provide technical leadership and strategic direction for the enterprise cloud services portfolio, including data, integration, platform, networking, security, observability, AI/ML, storage, and developer enablement services.
• Define and evolve enterprise reference architectures, engineering standards, and design patterns for cloud services.
• Drive standardization, rationalization, and adoption of enterprise cloud services to reduce complexity and maximize reuse across the organization.
• Lead the design of highly available, resilient, secure, scalable, and cost-effective cloud service platforms.
• Champion Infrastructure as Code, automation, and platform engineering practices to simplify provisioning, lifecycle management, and operations.
• Develop reusable cloud service modules, reference implementations, and engineering patterns that accelerate solution delivery.
• Partner with application engineering teams to improve developer experience through self-service capabilities, standardized service offerings, golden paths, templates, SDKs, and technical guidance.
• Establish operational excellence standards for cloud services, including reliability, observability, performance, capacity planning, disaster recovery, incident reduction, and automated operations.
• Drive continuous improvement of cloud platforms through automation, operational telemetry, resilience engineering, and cost optimization.
• Establish enterprise governance for cloud services by defining technical standards, evaluating new technologies, approving service patterns, and rationalizing overlapping capabilities.
• Influence enterprise technology strategy and architecture decisions while balancing innovation, operational excellence, security, and long-term sustainability.
• Serve as the organization's highest-level technical authority for enterprise cloud services, providing mentorship, architectural guidance, and cross-functional technical leadership.
• Consults and collaborates closely with Engineering leaders, Architecture, Security, and potentially external collaboration partners (FIs) that may be engaged with us on key efforts over the years.
• Keeps executive-level leaders informed of progress and problems.
• Balances technical leadership and savvy with strong business judgment to make the right decisions about technology choices.
• Makes recommendations at a critical level.
• Complies with all security policies and procedures, to ensure that the highest level of system and data confidentiality, integrity and availability is maintained.
• Support the company’s commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.

Benefits

• Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans as well as company contributions to your Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health & dependent care expenses.
• 401(k) Retirement Plan – Featuring a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on your first 6% deferral immediately upon eligibility.
• Flexible Time Off for Exempt (salaried) employees, as well as generous PTO for Non-Exempt (hourly) employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and a paid volunteer day.
• 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave
• Maven Family Planning – provides support through your Parenting journey including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.

What This Job Offers

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