The OpportunitySeeking an innovative, hands-on Principal Cloud Engineer who excels at the intersection of cloud resilience engineering, infrastructure automation, and technical leadership. In this role, you will define and drive enterprise-wide cloud reliability strategy - designing multi-region architectures, leading chaos engineering programs, building recovery tooling, and partnering with application teams to achieve measurable, validated resiliency outcomes in a regulated financial services environment.
The Work Itself- Lead architecture discovery sessions with application, infrastructure, security, and business stakeholders to define recovery objectives, dependency maps, and multi-region requirements
- Design multi-region AWS architectures - Active/Active, Warm Standby, Pilot Light, and Backup and Restore - aligned to application criticality, RTO/RPO targets, and compliance requirements
- Design and implement AWS Application Recovery Controller (ARC) patterns - readiness checks, routing controls, safety rules, and zonal shift - to enable deliberate, auditable traffic management and verify recovery environments are prepared before any failover event
- Evaluate AWS Resilience Hub to identify resilience gaps, map recovery policies, and drive remediation to measurable objectives
- Define traffic management and failover strategies using Amazon Route 53, CloudFront, load balancers, API Gateway, and health checks
- Design backup and recovery patterns using AWS Backup, S3, RDS/Aurora cross-region capabilities, encryption, and restore validation procedures
- Produce architecture decision records documenting service selection, alternatives considered, constraints, and expected outcomes
- Define secure AWS landing-zone controls and design IAM roles, permission boundaries, federation, and least-privilege access models for applications, automation, and platform services
- Establish infrastructure and application-performance monitoring using Amazon CloudWatch, Dynatrace, and distributed tracing; build log forwarding to enterprise analytics platforms including Splunk; design operational dashboards connecting infrastructure health, security findings, and recovery readiness indicators
- Develop FinOps operating models covering account ownership, tagging, chargeback, budgets, and anomaly detection; forecast cloud consumption and build cost-optimization business cases covering rightsizing, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances
- Evaluate migration strategy patterns and design migration approaches using EC2, VPC, S3, RDS, CloudFormation, containers, and serverless services aligned to business criticality and RTO/RPO targets
- Use AWS Migration Hub, Application Migration Service, and Database Migration Service to coordinate and execute migrations; define data migration, validation, reconciliation, rollback, and synchronization procedures aligned to RTO/RPO requirements with tested cutover plans
- Validate migrated workloads through functional, performance, backup, restore, and disaster-recovery testing
- Create reusable Terraform modules for VPC, IAM, ECS, RDS, S3, and monitoring; design GitLab CI/CD pipelines with validation, security scanning, plan review, approval controls, and drift detection
- Implement blue-green, canary, rolling, and controlled failover deployment patterns; build deployment safety controls including pre-deployment validation, health gates, blast-radius reduction, and automated rollback procedures
- Integrate cost-estimation tooling into pipelines and automate account and regional deployment workflows while preserving isolation, least privilege, and clear ownership
- Design and run controlled chaos engineering experiments using AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) targeting compute, database, network, and dependency layers with defined hypotheses, abort criteria, and observability instrumentation
- Create game days and disaster recovery exercises involving application owners, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and business stakeholders; develop recovery runbooks for AZ impairment, regional degradation, database failure, and capacity exhaustion; establish a recovery-testing calendar covering backup restoration, failover, and failback
- Define resilience engineering standards covering dependency mapping and failure-domain analysis; use experiment results to surface single points of failure and drive remediation with risk owners; coach application teams on resilience patterns and operational ownership
- Create executive-ready reporting summarizing recovery readiness, experiment coverage, open resilience risks, and reliability trends for leadership
The Qualifications We're Looking For- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information System, or other relevant field of study preferred
- 5+ years of hands-on experience in AWS cloud engineering or site reliability engineering in a large-scale, regulated environment
- Expert knowledge of AWS reliability services: Lambda, ECS, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, S3, SQS, EventBridge, CloudWatch, Route 53, CloudFront, API Gateway, and VPC networking
- Hands-on experience with AWS Application Recovery Controller (ARC), AWS Resilience Hub, and AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) - including readiness checks, routing controls, resiliency scoring, and chaos experiment design across compute, database, and network layers
- Experience designing multi-region architectures across Active/Active, Warm Standby, Pilot Light, and Backup and Restore patterns
- Expert-level AWS IAM knowledge including least-privilege design, permission boundaries, federation, and Service Control Policies (SCPs)
- Proficiency in Terraform for infrastructure as code and strong CI/CD experience with GitLab including pipeline design, OIDC authentication, and deployment safety controls
- Experience with AWS migration services: Migration Hub, Application Migration Service, Database Migration Service, and Application Discovery Service
- Proficiency in Python for automation and scripting; experience with Amazon CloudWatch, Dynatrace, Splunk, and distributed tracing
- Experience with FinOps practices including cost allocation, tagging, rightsizing, Savings Plans, and consumption forecasting
- Ability to lead resilience reviews, production readiness assessments, and architecture decisions; strong communication skills to translate technical recovery risks into executive-ready reporting and business outcomes
- Comfortable operating as both a principal individual contributor and a technical leader for distributed engineering teams
- Preferred Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional, or equivalent advanced AWS certifications
How We'll Have Your BackAlly's compensation program offers market-competitive base pay and pay-for-performance incentives (bonuses) based on achieving personal and company goals. Our Total Rewards program includes industry-leading compensation and benefits plus additional incentives that are designed to meet your needs and those of your family so you can get the most out of your career and your life, including:
Time Away: Program starts at 20 paid time off days in addition to 11 paid holidays and 8 hours of volunteer time off yearly (time off days are prorated based on start date and program varies based on full or part-time status and management level).
Planning for the Future: plan for the near and long term with an industry-leading 401K retirement savings plan with matching and company contributions, student loan pay downs and 529 educational save up assistance programs, tuition reimbursement, employee stock purchase plan, and financial learning center and financial coach access.
Supporting your Health & Well-being: flexible health and insurance options including medical, dental and vision, employee, spouse and child life insurance, short- and long-term disability, pre-tax Health Savings Account with employer contributions, Healthcare FSA, critical illness, accident & hospital indemnity insurance, and a total well-being program that helps you and your family stay on track physically, socially, emotionally, and financially.
Building a Family: adoption, surrogacy and fertility assistance as well as paid parental and caregiver leave, Dependent Day Care FSA back-up child and adult/elder care days and childcare discounts.
Work-Life Integration: other benefits including Mentally Fit Employee Assistance Program, subsidized and discounted Weight Watchers® program and other employee discount programs.
Other Compensations: depending on the role for which you are considered, you may be eligible for travel allowances, relocation assistance, a signing bonus and/or equity.
To view more detailed information about Ally's Total Rewards, please visit this link: https://www.ally.com/content/dam/pdf/corporate/ally-total-rewards-snapshot.pdf
Base Pay Range$110,000.00 - $180,000.00
An individual's position in the range is determined by the specific role, the scope and responsibilities of the role, work experience, education, certification(s), training, and additional qualifications. We review internal pay, the competitive market, and business environment prior to extending an offer.
Incentive Compensation: This position is eligible to participate in our annual incentive plan.
