Principal Engineer, Cloud Strategy Lead

Where Ambition Meets Innovation

Build a career that matches all your initiative with an impressive dose of innovation. From cutting-edge resources and a collaborative environment to the freedom to make an impact and more, you’ll find the ingredients you need at LPL Financial to shape your success while helping clients pursue their financial goals.

This is the most senior individual contributor role at the heart of LPL's AWS-first Cloud Center of Excellence. You'll set the multi-year strategy for our cloud tooling, Terraform code architecture, and self-service platform — with a dotted line to all five CCOE teams and the five Foundations pods — while spending the majority of your time in code, design documents, and proof-of-concept work. If you want technical leadership, mentorship, and influence at scale without the day-to-day of direct people management, this is your seat.

Job Overview:

As the Principal Engineer, Cloud Strategy Lead, you set and drive the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for LPL's Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE). This is a senior individual contributor role — not a team or pod leader — that leads cloud strategy and technical architecture across CCOE, with a dotted line to all five CCOE teams (Foundations, Platforms, Containers, Support, Delivery) and the five Foundations pods (Security & Governance, FinOps, Functional Design Engineering & Strategy, Network Engineering, Monitoring) so that strategy and technical architecture stay aligned across the organization. You own the engineering direction for our cloud tooling, Terraform code architecture, and self-service platform, and you are the primary technical liaison between CCOE and Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, and Application Engineering. LPL is an AWS-first CCOE: a multi-account landing zone with 100+ private reusable Terraform modules that enable 60+ AWS services, all delivered through Terraform Cloud and GitHub Actions. You are a hands-on senior IC who spends the majority of your time in code, reference patterns, and proof-of-concept work; technical mentorship across LPL's US offices and India Global Capability Center (GCC) drives your impact, not direct people management.

Responsibilities:

• Set and evolve the multi-year technical strategy for cloud tooling, IaC, and developer experience across all five CCOE teams (Foundations, Platforms, Containers, Support, Delivery) and the five Foundations pods (Security & Governance, FinOps, Functional Design Engineering & Strategy, Network Engineering, Monitoring)

• Define and govern Terraform code architecture standards: module library curation, versioning, deprecation, contribution patterns, and module quality gates

• Architect and operate the self-service infrastructure vending platform, including Account Factory for Terraform (AFT), Service Catalog, golden paths, and Internal Developer Platform (Backstage-class) integration

• Establish enterprise standards for IaC quality: pre-commit, policy-as-code (Sentinel / OPA), security and compliance scanning, drift detection, and automated remediation

• Act as the primary technical liaison between CCOE and Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, and Application Engineering

• Drive engineering excellence across CCOE: code review standards, pairing culture, on-call quality, post-incident review discipline, and continuous improvement of the developer experience

• Embed agentic AI capabilities into the team's engineering practice (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Bedrock, MCP servers, agentic IaC and review workflows) and into the platform's self-service experience for internal customers

• Drive the technical strategy for embedding agentic AI capabilities into the self-service platform: agentic IaC generation, automated PR review, MCP-backed agents for internal data, and conversational interfaces that let internal customers self-serve common requests

• Operate as a senior individual contributor with dotted-line technical leadership to all five CCOE teams (Foundations, Platforms, Containers, Support, Delivery) and the five Foundations pods (Security & Governance, FinOps, Functional Design Engineering & Strategy, Network Engineering, Monitoring) — leading cloud strategy and technical architecture across the organization

• Mentor and uplift senior engineers, AVPs, and VPs across CCOE through code review, design partnership, technical pairing, architecture guidance, and certification-path technical advice per the CCOE certification matrix — acting as a force multiplier without direct reports

• Operate as a hands-on senior IC: spend the majority of your time in Terraform code, design documents, peer reviews, prototyping, and incident response — technical contribution and mentorship are