Principal System Engineering

Principal Systems Engineer

This position requires office presence of a minimum of five days per week and is located in the posted location(s). No relocation is offered.

AT&T will not hire any applicants for this position who require employer sponsorship now or in the future.

Join AT&T and reimagine the communications and technologies that connect the world. The Technology Services organization is responsible for advancing information technology performance and delivering solutions with a focus on maximizing ROI, increasing efficiency, and enhancing the experience of end users. Guided by experienced leaders, Corporate Systems seamlessly integrates with advanced Technology and Operations to drive our enterprise forward. Our Systems Reliability and Software Delivery teams are unwavering in their commitment to excellence, ensuring every solution is robust and efficient.

When you step into a career with AT&T, you won't just imagine the future, you'll create it.

What You'll Do:

The Principal Systems Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for the reliability, security, scalability, governance, and strategic direction of critical enterprise platforms and cloud services. They will design, architect, and evolve enterprise-grade applications, platforms, and integration services by transforming business requirements into resilient technical solutions. Provide technical leadership for Kafka and IXBUS platforms, enabling event-driven architectures, real-time data exchange, and enterprise integration capabilities that deliver scalability, reliability, observability, and operational excellence across cloud and on-premises environments.

This role influences engineering, operations, architecture, security, and support teams while driving automation, modernization, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.

Responsibilities Include:

• Serve as the senior technical leader and primary platform steward for critical enterprise platforms and cloud services.
• Define and influence platform strategy, technical direction, architecture alignment, and long-term modernization roadmaps.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives across Engineering, Operations, Architecture, Cybersecurity, Support, and business stakeholders.
• Establish and promote engineering standards, operational best practices, automation principles, and platform governance models.
• Own platform reliability, scalability, resiliency, lifecycle planning, operational readiness, and business continuity posture.
• Lead compliance, cybersecurity, access governance, risk-management, and audit-readiness initiatives.
• Drive automation-first approaches across infrastructure, deployments, operational workflows, support processes, and self-service capabilities.
• Provide strategic oversight for CI/CD pipeline governance, release standards, artifact management, infrastructure automation, and deployment maturity.
• Lead observability, monitoring, alerting, logging, and service health strategies to improve operational visibility and reduce incident impact.
• Act as the highest-level escalation point for complex technical issues, major incidents, and platform-impacting events.
• Lead root cause analysis, problem management, corrective action planning, and prevention of recurring issues.
• Guide capacity planning, cloud cost optimization, licensing strategy, technology lifecycle management, and platform sustainability.
• Own disaster recovery strategy, planning, exercises, documentation, and continuous improvement.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, helping raise the engineering maturity of the broader organization.
• Influence decisions without direct authority by building alignment, communicating tradeoffs, and driving consensus.

What You'll Need:

Required Skills:

• Deep experience designing, operating, and governing enterprise-scale platforms and cloud infrastructure.
• 7+ years of cloud platforms, infrastructure services, platform engineering, and cloud governance practices.
• Experience with containerized workloads, orchestration platforms, microservices architectures, and cloud-native deployment patterns.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, release automation, artifact management,…