Principal Engineer - Cloud

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 Purpose

The 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 Functions

• Defines 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 Qualifications

• Education 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, Dev Ops, 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…