Principal Cloud Engineer

POSITION SUMMARY:

This position leads the design, build, operation, and continuous improvement of MSD’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform across manufacturing, commercial, CRO, and SaaS business segments, operating as a player-coach who provides technical direction, sets standards, and develops engineers while remaining deeply hands-on in architecting cloud infrastructure, automating delivery pipelines, and supporting production workloads.

The Principal Cloud Engineer leads the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams and partners closely with company stakeholders, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Systems, Software Engineering, the Methodical Mind product team, and the BAL CRO organization. The role champions automation, secure-by-design infrastructure, GxP and 21 CFR Part 11 alignment, and measurable business outcomes from MSD’s cloud investment.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Lead, mentor, and develop the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams: set technical direction, establish engineering standards and runbooks, conduct performance management and career development conversations, and recruit and onboard new talent.
• Architect, build, and operate MSD’s AWS environment across multiple accounts using AWS Organizations, Control Tower, and a landing-zone reference architecture; design for high availability, security, scalability, and recoverability.
• Stay deeply hands-on: write and review production Terraform, author CI/CD pipelines, debug production incidents, optimize cluster and database performance, and contribute code that the team will live with for years.
• Own and evolve MSD’s Infrastructure-as-Code standard (Terraform preferred; CloudFormation and CDK as needed), including module libraries, state management, branching and review patterns, and integration with CI/CD.
• Operate and extend MSD’s container and compute platforms (Amazon ECS, EKS/Kubernetes, EC2, Lambda, and serverless services) and the cluster-management, ingress, observability, and security tooling around them.
• Design and operate MSD’s cloud networking foundation — VPC, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, hybrid connectivity to on-prem (Nutanix AHV) and partner environments, Route 53, and edge services — in alignment with security and compliance requirements.
• Own the CI/CD platform (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or comparable) and the developer-platform tooling that accelerates delivery while enforcing required quality, security, and validation controls.
• Partner with Cybersecurity on cloud security engineering: IAM, KMS encryption, secrets management, GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, vulnerability management, and SIEM (SIEMonster/Wazuh) integration; lead remediation of cloud security findings.
• Lead Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices: define SLOs/SLIs, on-call rotations and incident response, observability standards (CloudWatch, CloudTrail, OpenSearch, Prometheus/Grafana, distributed tracing), capacity planning, and disaster-recovery testing.
• Partner with Enterprise Systems, Software Engineering, Methodical Mind, and BAL Services teams on cloud-native solution design, application onboarding, and migration patterns; provide architectural guidance and design reviews.
• Support MSD’s regulated environment: ensure cloud platforms, deployment processes, and change-control practices align with FDA 21 CFR Part 11, GxP, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 expectations; contribute to validation, audit, and assessment activities.
• Manage strategic vendor relationships (AWS, IaC and platform tooling vendors, managed service providers) and serve as the senior technical voice in vendor architecture and capacity discussions.
• Develop and own the cloud platform roadmap; partner with IS/IT leadership on multi-year planning, budgeting, and capability investment decisions.

EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or related discipline; equivalent combination of education and experience considered. Master’s preferred.
• Minimum 10 years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, or DevOps roles.
• Minimum 7 years of hands-on AWS engineering experience across core services (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, VPC, IAM, KMS, CloudFront, API Gateway, Route 53, CloudWatch, CloudTrail).
• Minimum 3 years of demonstrated people-leadership experience: managing engineers (direct reports or formal tech leads), setting go