Cloud & DevOps Engineering, Principal

Cloud & DevOps Engineering Principal

The Cloud & DevOps Engineering Principal leads the Operations functions responsible for the architecture, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of our multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS and GCP. This role manages a team of CloudOps and DevOps engineers, defines operating standards, and partners closely with Engineering, DevOps, and Security to ensure our platforms are secure, scalable, and highly available.

This role supports the execution of the broader CloudOps and DevOps strategy, helping to translate high-level direction into concrete operational practices for cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and release management.

The role also contributes to the governance and continuous improvement of build and release processes across SaaS and on-premise environments, in alignment with CloudOps leadership.

The role is deeply embedded in product development, overseeing the operational impact of new features end-to-end, from architectural design and delivery workflows to scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. This position safeguards the long-term health of the platform by ensuring that new capabilities align with established business processes, preserve performance at scale, and follow a clear, predictable, and repeatable development lifecycle across SaaS and on-premise environments, in close partnership with CloudOps, DevOps and Engineering leadership.

As a Cloud & DevOps Engineering Principal, you will shape the roadmap for Cloud and DevOps operations, drive best practices for Kubernetes, observability, automation, and disaster recovery, and use data and metrics to continuously improve our services. You remain technically strong and able to dive into details when needed, while focusing much of your time on team leadership, coordination, and cross-functional collaboration.

Team & Organizational Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and grow the CloudOps and DevOps teams, setting clear expectations, providing continuous feedback, and supporting professional development.
• Serve as the primary point of contact and escalation for complex, high-impact technical and operational issues affecting customers, the platform, or internal teams.
• Lead incident response and triage efforts, including customer-facing escalations and platform outages, providing clear technical direction, decision-making, and communication throughout the lifecycle of an incident.
• Coordinate team priorities, workload distribution, and on-call coverage to ensure consistent operational readiness and resilience.
• Drive CloudOps and DevOps strategy and roadmap in alignment with product, engineering, and business objectives.
• Actively participate in the product development lifecycle, capturing and validating deployment requirements, operational constraints, risks, and runbook considerations for new features and platform changes.
• Raise the bar for organizational excellence by enforcing high standards for availability, performance, security, and compliance, ensuring CloudOps and DevOps practices meet or exceed defined SLA and security requirements.
• Partner with CloudOps and DevOps leadership to define, evolve, and reinforce operational standards across change management, release processes, and incident response.

Cloud Infrastructure Management

• Oversee the architecture, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency of platform infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP, leveraging native cloud services while maintaining consistent operational principles.
• Own and evolve governance standards for the use of core cloud services, defining secure, repeatable, and compliant architectural patterns across all environments.
• Ensure all environments are properly monitored, secured, and operationally aligned with product and customer requirements.
• Provide technical leadership and operational guidance for multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies, balancing flexibility, resilience, and cost.
• Maintain direct ownership and involvement in the platform's on-premise footprint, including Windows-based desktop and server components, ensuring first-class build, packaging, and installer experiences for Windows users.
• Define and enforce the full software lifecycle for on-premise and desktop applications, from build pipelines and release artifacts to deployment, upgrade, and supportability considerations.
• Ensure cloud-native infrastructure designs remain compatible with closed and restricted on-premise deployments, preserving portability, operational feasibility, and customer autonomy.
• Drive continuous improvements to infrastructure design that support both highly scalable cloud deployments and secure, self-contained on-premise installations.

Kubernetes Orchestration & Automation

• Lead day-to-day infrastructure and application-level operations, with deep hands-on involvement in Kubernetes platforms (EKS, GKE, AKS), serverless workloads, and cloud-native infrastructure, enforcing the highest standards of availability and resilience.
• Own and oversee Kubernetes operations end-to-end, including cluster lifecycle management, capacity planning, upgrades, and workload reliability.
• Govern all networking, connectivity, and security-adjacent infrastructure, including ingress controllers, service mesh, gateways, firewalls, VPNs, and inter-environment connectivity.
• Drive a strong automation-first culture across the CloudOps organization, enforcing standardization and repeatability through infrastructure-as-code and GitOps practices.
• Lead and evolve automation pipelines using tools such as Terraform, Terragrunt, ArgoCD, Helm, and Ansible, ensuring consistency across cloud and on-premise environments.
• Define and enforce standardized deployment strategies, including rolling updates and blue/green rollouts, to minimize operational risk and service disruption.
• Establish and rigorously apply change management procedures for infrastructure and application changes, reducing release risk while maintaining delivery velocity.
• Promote continuous improvement and upskilling in Kubernetes and cloud-native operations, including structured learning paths and certifications where appropriate.

Monitoring, Alerting & Optimization

• Own monitoring/observability with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry.
• Define and refine SLOs, alerts, and performance metrics.
• Use metrics and incidents to drive preventive improvements.
• Track/report key CloudOps and DevOps KPIs (uptime, MTTR, change failure rate, deployment frequency).

Database & Data Platform Management

• Guide production MongoDB, Redis, MySQL operations (scale, backup, failover, performance).
• Ensure databases are monitored, secure, and well integrated.
• Work with data/app teams on capacity and growth planning for DBs and caches.

Security & Compliance

• Champion secure cloud practices (RBAC, encryption, segmentation, audits).
• Oversee SSO and identity federation (OAuth, SAML, OIDC).
• Support Security/Compliance to meet required standards.
• Assist with security assessments/audits, remediation, and process improvements.

Automation, CI/CD & Infrastructure-as-Code

• Promote infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, etc.).
• Partner with DevOps/engineering on reliable, auditable CI/CD pipelines.
• Drive reuse of automation for provisioning, deployment, and configuration.
• Support CI/CD and release governance, ensuring agreed quality/security/rollback controls for SaaS and on-prem.

Networking & Traffic Management

• Oversee cloud networking (VPCs, subnets, NAT, target groups, ACLs).
• Guide service mesh and traffic management for microservices.
• Help standardize network patterns and connectivity across cloud, data centers, and partners.

Cost Management & Capacity Planning

• Monitor and optimize cloud costs with Finance and Product/Engineering.
• Use tagging/reporting to attribute spend by product or environment.
• Collaborate on capacity planning as usage and customers grow.
• Provide cost/capacity summaries to leadership with trends, risks, and optimizations.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Communication

• Act as a key CloudOps and DevOps partner for Product, DevOps, SRE, Security, and IT.
• Join planning to align CloudOps and DevOps initiatives with product and company priorities.
• Communicate clearly on platform health, risks, incidents, and improvements.
• Serve as an operational escalation point for major incidents/releases, coordinating resolution and follow-up with leadership and partner teams.

What We Require

Experience and skills:

• 8–10+ years of experience in CloudOps, DevOps, or SRE roles, including formal leadership of engineers or small teams.