Principal Engineer - DevOps - Paze

At Early Warning, we’ve powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting‑edge solutions like Zelle®, Paze℠, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Engineering at Early Warning (EWS) is a blend of teams organized around many different platforms, capabilities and products that are brought together to power core capabilities at the biggest banks in America – this includes ubiquitous products like Zelle, Decision Intelligence and Paze.

These capabilities are enabled by modern, accessible, and responsive user interfaces driven by React and Java.

If you are hungry for large scale challenges and crave opportunities to learn and contribute in a big way on products used by millions of people – we’d love to talk to you!

Overall Purpose

Leads the design, development, documentation, testing, debugging, automation, and maintenance of the technical infrastructure required for effective and efficient software development and delivery, e.g. infrastructure as code, CICD patterns, configuration management, and containerized product applications. Ensures platforms are engineered to best‑in‑class standards with innovation, high availability, and disaster avoidance built in. Defines, drives, and executes the technical strategy of major components of engineering functions. This position is a hands‑on, expert‑level individual contributor; a technical leader involved in setting the standards, ensuring excellence in quality of outputs across multiple teams, and assuring the scalability and reliability driving the success of Paze.

Essential Functions

• Serves as a technical expert, thought leader, improvement pioneer, and player‑coach‑mentor working closely with and between leadership and individual contributors to foster a culture of continuous self‑improvement and iterative incremental advancement.
• Obsesses about the usability of the systems you build, enabling an intuitive and predictable experience working with infrastructure at scale. Drives innovation with process and technology through simple approaches and solutions that improve product quality and development processes at every step.
• Brings a natural curiosity and deep expertise in troubleshooting complex infrastructure problems, spanning multiple layers of the stack, requiring proficiency in several different tools, tool sets, and methods for rapidly isolating and solving issues.
• Provides technical and process expertise in building and automating cloud‑based resources and services across compute, networking, storage, observability, and security leveraging Terraform, Ansible, and other tooling to create highly scalable distributed deployments with built‑in reliability.
• Leads infrastructure‑as‑code, pipeline, and other development projects while leveraging sound engineering fundamentals and best‑practice microservice design patterns, to deliver standardized, reliable, and repeatable cloud deployments.
• Designs and implements application service solutions, abstractions, and modularity aligned with our technology strategy to simplify the complexities of cloud providers (AWS), open‑source technologies (Kubernetes), and internal EWS infrastructure and services (network, firewall, load balancer, other). Informs cloud‑native architecture and design for robustness, security, and observability, prioritizing growth, ease of maintenance, and operational readiness / self‑service.
• Possesses a deep understanding of DORA metrics and DOMM, how to assess current state, and how to facilitate and measure improvement.
• Advances the team's ability to create and operate observable software and pipeline solutions. Ensures healthy and performant pipelines by analyzing results, failures, and bugs to determine causes of errors. Tunes processes and pipelines and builds new automation to fix problems in the code delivery processes, acting as an expert and escalation point for others. Champions code quality and standardization through first principles of immutability, ephemerality, independence, and consistency while designing, developing, documenting, testing, debugging, and automating pipelines and infrastructure as code. Leverages your experience in building and automating CI/CD pipelines and scalable workflows to supercharge end‑to‑end code throughput across the entire value stream.
• Be the voice of reason when needed, and an agent for positive change; besides driving technical innovation by staying on top of best practices, encourage experimentation, scientific thinking, and finding ways to continually adopt good practices.
• Partners with software engineering, product, and architecture, to shape engineering approaches, methods, and definitions of "what good looks like" for scalable, high‑performance, cloud‑native applications. Helps build the vision of the future by demonstrating the art of the possible via orchestration, developer experience, technology strategy, and road mapping the path.
• Accelerates end‑to‑end value attainment by partnering closely with product management and engineering teams, collaborating, and providing input on a broad range of initiatives, taking ownership of and responsibility for technical design / implementation, and advancing team capabilities to deliver products our customers are happy to use.
• Leads large‑scale projects from concept to completion, ensuring timely delivery of high‑quality solutions and outcomes for the business.
• Supports the company’s commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.
• The above job description is not intended to be an all‑inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow instructions and perform other related duties as assigned by their supervisor.

Minimum Qualifications

• Education and/or experience typically obtained through completion of a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent certifications.
• Typically 15 years of related experience with 5 or more years of work experience in medium to large scale enterprise.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in modern application design patterns.
• Demonstrated prior DevOps, software engineering or related experience.
• Experience in building and automating observability at scale for complex transactional systems.
• Ability to work on multiple projects and general understanding of software environments and network topologies.
• Able to facilitate technical design sessions.
• Solid understanding of an iterative software development process.
• Ability to use Linux administration command line programs and create/edit scripts.
• Knowledge of one or more of the tools and approaches – IaC, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Harness, CI/CD, workflow / pipeline automation, container orchestration, TKGi, PKS, EKS, ECS.
• Experienced with security and encryption protocols.
• Must be able to work different schedules as part of an on‑call rotation.
• High level of customer responsiveness, excellent documentation and communication skills, deep attention to detail, clear understanding of how to prioritize work.
• Experience designing cloud infrastructure for robustness, security, and observability.
• Expertise in AWS foundations including compute, networking, storage, observability, and security. Experience in automating AWS services (EC2, IAM, ELB, Route53, S3, Lambda, Cloud Formation, DynamoDB). Experience in highly scalable distributed cloud computer systems.
• Proficient with using and debugging networks, DNS, TLS, load‑balancing, build systems, Linux, Docker, and any unique attributes of cloud‑based systems.
• Background and drug screen.

Preferred Qualifications

• Additional related education and/or experience preferred.
• Certification in Terraform, AWS, and Kubernetes.
• AWS, Azure (and/ or other cloud‑based) certification(s) strongly preferred.

The Pay Scale For This Position In

Phoenix, AZ/Chicago, IL in USD per year is: $172,000 - $215,000.

San Francisco, CA in USD per year is: $206,000 - $250,000.

This pay scale is subject to change and is not necessarily reflective of actual compensation that may be earned, nor a promise of any specific pay for any specific candidate, which is always dependent on legitimate factors considered at the time of job offer. Early Warning Services takes into consideration a variety of factors when determining a competitive salary offer, including, but not limited to, the job scope, market rates and geographic location of a position, candidate’s education, experience, training, and specialized skills or certification(s) in relation to the job requirements and compared with internal equity (peers). The business actively supports and reviews wage equity to ensure that pay decisions are not based on gender, race, national origin, or any other protected classes.

Additionally, candidates are eligible for a discretionary bonus, and benefits.

Physical Requirements

Early Warning works together in a highly collaborative office environment. Working conditions consist of a normal office environment. Work is primarily sedentary and requires extensive use of a computer and involves sitting for periods of approximately four hours. Work may require occasional standing, walking, kneeling, and reaching. Must be able to lift 10 pounds occasionally and/or negligible amount of force frequently. Requires visual acuity and dexterity to view, prepare, and manipulate documents and office equipment including personal computers. Requires the ability to communicate with internal and/or external customers.

Employee must be able to perform essential functions and physical requirements of position with or without reasonable accommodation.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States at the date of hire.

Some of the Ways We Prioritize Your Health and Happiness

• Healthcare Coverage –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.
• Paid Time Off – 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.

And SO much more! We continue to enhance our program, so be sure to check our Benefits page here for the latest. Our team can share more during the interview process!

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Early Warning Services, LLC (“Early Warning”) considers for employment, hires, retains and promotes qualified candidates on the basis of ability, potential, and valid qualifications without regard to race, religious creed, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, protected veteran or disability status or any factor prohibited by law, and as such affirms in policy and practice to support and promote equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and municipal laws. The company also prohibits discrimination on other bases such as medical condition, marital status or any other factor that is irrelevant to the performance of our employees.