Principal Engineer - Cloud (Chicago)

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.Overall PurposeThe Principal Engineer - Cloud Engineering is a strategic individual contributor and technical leader responsible for defining and advancing Early Warning’s cloud engineering direction, architecture standards, and enterprise implementation approach. This role leads the most complex cloud engineering initiatives across teams and influences technical strategy for scalable, secure, resilient, and cost-effective cloud platforms.The role partners closely with engineering, architecture, security, risk, compliance, and platform teams to enable high-performance cloud-native solutions and guide critical decisions as Early Warning continues its multi-year migration of mission-critical applications and data from on-premise environments to AWS. The Principal Engineer is recognized as an expert in cloud engineering, drives technical patterns and guardrails, and helps teams deliver solutions that balance developer productivity, operational excellence, regulatory requirements, and long-term platform sustainability.Essential FunctionsDefines and leads cloud engineering strategy, reference architectures, and technical standards for AWS-based infrastructure and platform capabilities.Leads the design of highly scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-optimized cloud-native solutions using AWS services such as EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, EKS, IAM, VPC, KMS, and related services.Solves the most complex infrastructure and platform problems, including issues that span multiple systems, teams, and technology layers.Leads root cause analysis for significant incidents, drives durable corrective actions, and improves platform reliability, resiliency, and operational readiness.Establishes enterprise patterns for infrastructure as code, automation, and CI/CD practices using tools such as Terraform and related delivery tooling.Partners with Security, Risk, and Compliance teams to design and maintain cloud controls that meet regulatory and policy requirements, including PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FFIEC, and other applicable standards.Provides technical leadership for internal and external audits by shaping control evidence approaches, addressing audit requests, and improving audit readiness.Architects disaster recovery, high availability, backup, and fault-tolerant strategies for critical cloud services and validates recovery approaches through testing and continuous improvement.Defines and enforces cloud security best practices including identity and access management, network segmentation, encryption, key management, secrets handling, and secure workload configuration.Drives cloud vulnerability management and configuration compliance strategies to ensure remediation, patching, and hardening practices meet service level expectations.Establishes cloud observability standards and leads implementation of logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting solutions to support complex transactional systems.Influences technical roadmaps, sequencing, and investment decisions across engineering teams to improve cloud adoption, operability, and platform consistency.Builds strong cross-functional relationships and serves as a trusted advisor to engineering leaders and senior stakeholders on cloud architecture, risk, tradeoffs, and long-term technical direction.Produces clear and durable technical documentation, standards, architecture artifacts, and guidance that enable scalable adoption across teams.Mentors engineers and technical leaders by raising engineering standards, sharing expertise, and guiding design and execution on high-impact initiatives.Supports the company’s commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.Minimum QualificationsEducation and/or experience typically obtained through a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field.Typically has 15 years of experience or demonstrated portfolio consistent with experience required of the role in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or related technical roles.Typically has 5 years of experience or demonstrated portfolio consistent with experience required of the role designing and operating solutions in AWS at enterprise scale.Deep expertise in AWS core services including compute, storage, networking, identity, container orchestration, and managed data services.Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, container platforms, Linux environments, and distributed systems design.Demonstrated experience leading architecture and technical direction for large-scale, business-critical, cloud-based platforms or migrations.Demonstrated ability to influence engineers, architects, and leaders across multiple teams without direct authority.Strong experience establishing and scaling infrastructure as code practices using Terraform and related automation tooling.Strong knowledge of mature engineering practices including CI/CD, testing, secure engineering, operational readiness, and software delivery lifecycle disciplines.Proven experience implementing and governing security and compliance controls aligned with frameworks such as PCI-DSS, SOC 2, or FFIEC.Strong experience designing and operationalizing observability solutions for complex, high-availability transactional environments.Strong judgment in evaluating technical tradeoffs involving reliability, security, cost, speed, and maintainability.Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.High level of customer responsiveness, strong documentation skills, attention to detail, and ability to prioritize effectively in ambiguous environments.Background and drug screen required.Preferred QualificationsMaster’s degree in computer science, management information systems, or related field.Current AWS certification(s) and/or other relevant cloud certifications.Experience leading large-scale cloud migration or modernization programs in regulated environments.Experience with policy-as-code, cloud governance frameworks, and developer enablement models that improve safe self-service adoption.Experience with monitoring and alerting platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Splunk, or AppDynamics.Experience with container and workload security technologies.Experience with programming or scripting languages such as Python, Java, C#, Ruby, or Shell.Knowledge of ACH/EFT and real-time payment networks, including RTP or FedNow.Experience in FinTech, banking, payments, or other highly regulated industries.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.The base pay scale for this position in:Phoenix, AZ/ Chicago, IL in USD per year is: $173,000 - $230,000.San Francisco, CA in USD per year is: $207,000 - $242,000.Additionally, candidates are eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits.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.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, ge