Principal Cloud Infrastructure Engineer (AWS)

AWS Platform Technical Lead 

Position Summary 

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to lead our AWS Cloud Engineering team, owning the Amazon Web Services platform for the enterprise. This is a foundational platform role — you are the AWS technical authority, setting architectural direction, establishing engineering standards, and ensuring the platform is secure, scalable, and built to last. 

You lead from the front. You design the systems others build on, mentor the engineers around you, and hold the line on quality and best practices. You bring deep AWS expertise, a platform-owner mindset, and the leadership presence to align engineers and stakeholders around a shared technical vision.  This role demands a cloud-first thinker who ensures cloud solutions meet business needs efficiently while prioritizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to create repeatable, automated deployments. You need to have a proven track record of architecting cloud environments from scratch. You'll drive cloud transformation initiatives across all CSP’s with a focus on AWS platforms while ensuring every design decision considers security, reliability, and scalability. 

This is not a hands-off leadership role — you write code, review designs, and stay close to the work. 

Major Responsibilities 

1.  AWS Platform Ownership 

• Own the enterprise AWS platform end-to-end: AWS Organizations structure, account hierarchy, while collaborating with several teams to ensure the platform is stable and compliant.

• Define and maintain the AWS Landing Zone — AWS Control Tower, Service Control Policies (SCPs), billing controls, and account vending patterns — as the foundation all product teams build on. 

• Serve as the final technical authority on AWS architecture decisions, reviewing designs for scalability, security, and operational excellence before they reach production. 

• Build self-service platform capabilities that enable product engineering teams to move fast without compromising standards. 

2.  Technical Team Leadership 

• Lead the AWS cloud engineering team as the technical anchor — set direction, conduct design reviews, unblock engineers, and drive delivery on platform initiatives. 

• Establish and enforce engineering standards: IaC patterns, naming conventions, tagging strategy, branching models, and deployment practices. 

• Mentor engineers at all levels, building depth on the team and raising the bar on what “excellence” looks like in cloud engineering. 

• Partner with architecture, security, operations, and business stakeholders to translate enterprise requirements into platform capabilities. 

3.  Infrastructure as Code & Automation 

• Design and own the Terraform framework for all AWS resource provisioning — reusable modules, remote state management via S3/DynamoDB, pipeline integration, and policy guardrails. 

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, GitHub Actions, and Amazon ECR for both platform infrastructure and application teams. 

• Write production-quality automation to extend platform functionality, integrate AWS APIs, and eliminate operational toil. 

• Implement policy-as-code using OPA, AWS Config Rules, and Service Control Policies to enforce governance at scale without manual gatekeeping. 

4.  Networking, Security & Compliance 

• Architect and operate AWS networking: VPC design, VPC Lattice, AWS PrivateLink, Transit Gateway, AWS WAF, Shield Advanced, NAT Gateway, and hybrid connectivity via AWS Direct Connect and Site-to-Site VPN. 

• Own the enterprise security posture on AWS — IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA), ECR Image Signing, AWS Secrets Manager, least-privilege IAM design, and SIEM/CSPM integration (AWS Security Hub, Prisma Cloud, or Wiz). 

• Drive continuous automated compliance across applicable regulatory frameworks (HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2) so controls are enforced in real time, not discovered at audit. 

• Integrate observability — Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, Datadog, and SLO/SLI frameworks — as a first-class platform capability across all workloads. 

5.  Platform Strategy & Continuous Improvement 

• Own the AWS platform roadmap, evaluating new AWS services and capabilities and making deliberate decisions about what the enterprise adopts and when. 

• Incorporate FinOps practices across the platform: Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, rightsizing, AWS Budgets alerting, and cost allocation as engineering disciplines, not afterthoughts. 

• Research and pilot emerging AWS capabilities — Amazon Bedrock, EKS Auto Mode, Amazon Q for Developer — evaluating their fit for enterprise adoption. 

• Foster a culture of operational excellence: blameless postmortems, runbook-driven operations, and continuous improvement cycles that make the platform more reliable over time. 

Required Qualifications 

• 10+ years in cloud and infrastructure engineering with 5+ years of deep, hands-on AWS experience at enterprise scale. 

• Proven ownership of an AWS Organization — account hierarchy, Billing, Service Control Policies, IAM, and multi-account governance in production. 

• Demonstrated technical leadership: you have led a platform team or major enterprise cloud initiative, set technical direction, and grown engineers around you. 

Deep AWS expertise required across: 

Compute & Containers: EKS (Managed + Auto Mode), ECS/Fargate, EC2, Auto Scaling Groups 

Preferred Qualifications 

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (strongly preferred) 

• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional 

• HashiCorp Terraform Associate or Professional certification 

• Experience in regulated industries applying HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or FedRAMP controls on AWS 

• Familiarity with AWS Outposts, EKS Anywhere, and multi-cloud connectivity patterns 

• Experience with Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, and MLOps patterns on AWS 

Education 

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent demonstrated experience.