Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-hitting Principal Cloud Engineering role at Early Warning, the powerhouse behind financial networks like Zelle. You will spearhead their multi-year migration of mission-critical transactional platforms from on-premise infrastructure to AWS while navigating strict financial regulatory requirements. If you enjoy solving massive architectural bottlenecks and influencing engineering culture across an entire enterprise without relying on direct authority, this position is worth a serious look.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day-to-day will involve defining enterprise-wide cloud standards, designing secure and highly available AWS architectures, and leading post-mortems for major platform incidents. You'll spend a lot of time partnering with Security, Risk, and Compliance teams to bake controls into the infrastructure layer, ensuring compliance with PCI-DSS and FFIEC frameworks. You won't just be drawing diagrams; you will be writing Terraform patterns, scaling Kubernetes clusters, and setting the technical guardrails that hundreds of other developers will follow.
The Core Tech Stack
You need absolute mastery of AWS core services (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, EKS, IAM, VPC, KMS) paired with deep, production-level expertise in Kubernetes and container orchestration. Infrastructure as Code is non-negotiable here, so you must be deeply fluent in Terraform and automated CI/CD pipelines. Because you are dealing with real-time financial services, a strong background in distributed systems design and robust observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or Datadog) will be your daily bread and butter.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring panel to test your real-world battle scars by asking how you would architect a multi-region, active-active disaster recovery strategy for a payment processing pipeline with zero data loss tolerance. They want to see how you balance strict security and compliance controls against developer velocity without creating massive bottlenecks. When answering, focus heavily on trade-offs, fault isolation, and practical observability rather than textbook theory.
Application Advice
Your resume needs to scream enterprise scale and rigorous compliance. Make sure terms like "AWS migration," "Terraform," "PCI-DSS," and "Kubernetes" are front and center, backed by hard metrics showing cost optimizations, uptime improvements, or successful large-scale migrations you've personally led. Skip the generic management fluff and emphasize your hands-on architectural leadership in high-stakes, regulated environments to easily clear their ATS filters.
