The DevOps Principal Engineer – Tech Lead provides senior technical leadership across cloud engineering, automation, and DevOps practices. The role blends hands-on engineering excellence with leadership responsibility to deliver scalable, secure, and resilient DevOps solutions across global, multi-region environments.
The Principal Engineer collaborates with architects, product owners, QA, Security, and global engineering teams to define standards, guide solution design, and mature DevOps capabilities across the program.
- Architect and implement DevOps solutions including CI/CD, containerization, IaC, and cloud‑native designs in Azure.
- Design multi‑stage CI/CD pipelines for complex applications with automation‑first, zero‑touch principles.
- Lead Helm chart design, Kubernetes manifests, and release templates for enterprise deployments.
- Drive AKS strategy: lifecycle, security, networking, scaling, and multi‑region resiliency.
- Ensure alignment with EY reference architectures, governance, and security controls.
- Evaluate and select DevOps and automation tooling to improve reliability and delivery velocity.
- Lead modernization from classic/legacy pipelines to YAML and GitHub Actions.
- Oversee backlog execution, ensuring automated build, test, and deployment processes.
- Drive consistent delivery of DevOps capabilities aligned to defined standards.
- Lead configuration management and environment alignment for multi‑region deployments.
- Lead troubleshooting and root‑cause analysis of complex deployment or automation incidents.
- Advance DevOps maturity through measurable improvements in delivery and reliability metrics.
- Promote automation‑first, GitOps, secure SDLC, YAML pipelines, and shift‑left.
- Implement mandatory scanning, secrets management, dependency governance, and hardening.
- Define standards for branching, versioning, Helm packaging, release governance, and promotions.
- Ensure compliance with EY security requirements using SonarQube, AquaSec, Mend.
- Establish RBAC, audit trails, and governance across Azure, AKS, and CI/CD.
- Serve as senior DevOps authority for architecture, cybersecurity, QA, and product teams.
- Drive cross‑team decision‑making with clear communication and proactive risk escalation.
- Work with engineering leads to embed DevOps practices and self‑service capabilities.
- Maintain high‑quality documentation across architecture, CI/CD, runbooks, and dependencies.
- Mentor engineers and promote DevOps maturity across the organization.
- Deliver training on CI/CD, Kubernetes, automation, and DevOps best practices.
- 5–10 years hands‑on Azure experience.
- Deep AKS expertise including cluster design, networking, security, RBAC, multi‑region deployments.
- Strong knowledge of Azure Networking, App Gateway/WAF, App Service, Functions, Logic Apps, Storage, Azure SQL, Traffic Manager, Key Vault, Service Bus, Monitoring suite.
- GitHub / ADO: branching, YAML pipelines, release governance.
- Advanced CI/CD design including platform migrations.
- Docker and multi‑stage Dockerfiles; image optimization.
- Helm expertise (required).
- Terraform or Bicep (preferred); ARM templates.
- Ansible/Ansible Tower (plus).
- Deployments, ingress, config maps, secrets, RBAC, network policies.
- HPA/VPA scaling; GitOps tooling (Flux/ArgoCD) preferred.
- Helm Charts expertise (required).
- Service mesh experience (Istio/Linkerd) desired.
- Experience with SonarQube, Mend, AquaSec.
- Secrets management with Key Vault or Vault.
- Container security and vulnerability management.
- C#, Python, or NodeJS (for understanding application build/test requirements)
- Strong scripting in PowerShell, Bash or Python.
- Strong YAML proficiency for CI/CD and Kubernetes.
- REST APIs and integration patterns.
- Automation via Azure, GitHub, and Kubernetes APIs.
- Azure Monitor, App Insights, Grafana, Prometheus.
- Logging and analytics with Log Analytics.
- SRE practices including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets.
- Experience with GitHub Copilot, AI agents, automation opportunities.
- Understanding of AI/ML ops or OpenAI integration (plus).
- Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
- Leading global teams across time zones.
- Large‑scale CI/CD modernization
- SRE and observability implementation.
- FinOps and cloud cost optimization.
