$160,000 - $200,000 + VIP BonusJOB SUMMARYThe Principal Cloud Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for designing, advancing, and governing the AWS platforms that support our B2B SaaS products. This role combines deep AWS expertise with architecture leadership, automation, reliability engineering, security, observability, and cloud financial management.
The Principal Cloud Engineer solves complex infrastructure problems across products and teams, establishes reusable engineering standards, and influences technical direction through expertise rather than organizational authority. The role partners closely with FinOps, Site Reliability Engineering, SRE Architects, Security Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, Development teams, and Cloud Operations to ensure cloud solutions are reliable, secure, scalable, supportable, and financially sustainable.
Core Duties and Responsibilities: Cloud Architecture and Engineering - Design and implement highly available, resilient, scalable, secure, and cost-effective AWS architectures for enterprise SaaS applications.
- Serve as a senior technical authority for AWS infrastructure, platform engineering, and cloud operations.
- Define reference architectures, engineering standards, and reusable infrastructure patterns across accounts, products, and environments.
- Lead technical design and implementation for cloud migrations, modernization initiatives, and major platform changes.
- Evaluate architectures for reliability, performance, scalability, security, maintainability, operational complexity, and cost.
- Provide deep expertise across AWS services including EC2, Auto Scaling, ELB, VPC, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, Route 53, S3, EBS, AWS Backup, RDS, FSx, IAM, Organizations, Control Tower, KMS, WAF, CloudFront, CloudWatch, Systems Manager, Lambda, Config, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub, and hybrid connectivity.
Cross-Functional Technical Leadership - Partner with SRE and SRE Architects on availability, resilience, service-level objectives, observability, capacity, failure-mode analysis, incident prevention, and disaster recovery.
- Work with FinOps to incorporate cost, licensing, utilization, forecasting, and optimization into architecture decisions.
- Partner with Security Engineering to implement secure-by-default designs, scalable controls, governance, IAM, encryption, segmentation, logging, and preventative guardrails.
- Collaborate with Enterprise Architecture to align cloud standards with broader technology strategy, modernization objectives, and architectural principles.
- Work directly with Development teams to understand application requirements, remove infrastructure barriers, improve runtime architectures, and troubleshoot complex production issues.
- Lead architecture and design reviews involving multiple technical disciplines and drive decisions to closure when requirements or priorities conflict.
Reliability, Operations, and Performance - Design systems for fault isolation, automated recovery, graceful degradation, backup, and disaster recovery.
- Identify and eliminate single points of failure and systemic operational risks.
- Participate in major production incidents and lead cloud infrastructure investigation when deep technical expertise is required.
- Use incidents and postmortems to drive permanent, systemic improvements.
- Establish monitoring, metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and infrastructure telemetry standards.
- Diagnose complex performance issues across compute, networking, storage, databases, and applications.
- Develop capacity-planning approaches and identify scaling limitations before they affect customers.
Infrastructure as Code and Automation - Establish Infrastructure-as-Code as the standard for provisioning and managing AWS infrastructure.
- Develop reusable Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, or equivalent modules and patterns.
- Integrate infrastructure deployment, validation, security, and governance into CI/CD workflows.
- Automate provisioning, configuration, patching, scaling, recovery, lifecycle management, and operational tasks.
- Reduce manual work and improve repeatability, auditability, and deployment safety.
Security and Cloud Financial Management - Translate security and compliance requirements into practical engineering controls.
- Design using least privilege, defense in depth, and secure-by-default principles.
- Support vulnerability remediation and compliance frameworks applicable to enterprise SaaS environments.
- Incorporate AWS cost management into architecture and engineering decisions.
- Identify waste, improve utilization, and help technical teams understand the financial impact of architectural decisions.
Technical Leadership and Mentorship - Act as an escalation point for the organization's most complex AWS infrastructure problems.
- Lead technical design reviews and challenge architectures that introduce unnecessary reliability, security, cost, or operational risk.
- Influence technical direction across Cloud Operations, SRE, Security, Architecture, FinOps, and Development.
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers and raise engineering standards across the organization.
- Develop documentation, standards, reference architectures, and operational practices.
- Promote strong ownership, disciplined troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, automation, and operational excellence.
Qualifications: - 12+ years of experience in cloud or infrastructure engineering
- 7+ years of deep, hands-on AWS engineering experience supporting large-scale, highly available production environments
- Demonstrated experience designing and operating AWS environments supporting business-critical B2B SaaS or comparable enterprise applications.
- Strong experience with enterprise AWS architecture, multi-account environments, networking, IAM, compute, storage, databases, observability, and security.
- Advanced knowledge of AWS networking including VPCs, routing, load balancing, DNS, security groups, private connectivity, and hybrid networking.
- Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience using Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, or equivalent technologies.
- Strong automation and scripting skills using Python, PowerShell, Bash, or comparable languages.
- Strong Linux and/or Windows production systems experience.
- Experience with backup, disaster recovery, resilience engineering, and high-severity incident response.
- Experience troubleshooting complex infrastructure, application, network, storage, and performance issues.
- Understanding of cloud financial management and AWS cost optimization.
- Demonstrated ability to collaborate with SRE, architecture, security, development, operations, and FinOps teams.
- Ability to influence technical decisions across teams without direct organizational authority.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with engineers, architects, product teams, and senior leadership, preferred.
Additional Requirements and Details:• Travel required up to 10% of the time.
• Located and working from an office location.
• Occasional lifting and/or moving up to 10 pounds.
• Frequent repetitive hand and arm movements required to operate a computer.
• Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision (working on a computer, etc.).
• Frequent sitting and/or standing.
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Skills & Requirements
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Why Vertafore is the place for you: *Canada Only
- The opportunity to work in a space where modern technology meets a stable and vital industry
- Medical, vision & dental plans
- Life, AD&D
- Short Term and Long Term Disability
- Pension Plan & Employer Match
- Maternity, Paternity and Parental Leave
- Employee and Family Assistance Program (EFAP)
- Education Assistance
- Additional programs - Employee Referral and Internal Recognition
Why Vertafore is the place for you: *US Only
- The opportunity to work in a space where modern technology meets a stable and vital industry
- We have a Flexible First work environment! Our North America team members use our offices for collaboration, community and team-building, with members asked to sometimes come into an office and/or travel depending on job responsibilities. Other times, our teams work from home or a similar environment.
- Medical, vision & dental plans
- PPO & high-deductible options
- Health Savings Account & Flexible Spending Accounts Options:
- Health Care FSA
- Dental & Vision FSA
- Dependent Care FSA
- Commuter FSA
- Life, AD&D (Basic & Supplemental), and Disability
- 401(k) Retirement Savings Plain & Employer Match
- Supplemental Plans - Pet insurance, Hospital Indemnity, and Accident Insurance
- Parental Leave & Adoption Assistance
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
- Education & Legal Assistance
- Additional programs - Tuition Reimbursement, Employee Referral, Internal Recognition, and Wellness
- Commuter Benefits (Denver)
The Professional Services (PS) and Customer Success (CX) bonus plans are a quarterly monetary bonus plan based upon individual and practice performance against specific business metrics. Eligibility is determined by several factors including: start date, good standing in the company, and actives status at time of payout.
The Vertafore Incentive Plan (VIP) is an annual monetary bonus for eligible employees based on both individual and company performance. Eligibility is determined by several factors including: start date, good standing in the company, and actives status at time of payout.
Commission plans are tailored to each sales role but common components include quota, MBO's and ABPMs. Salespeople receive their formal compensation plan within 30 days of hire.
