This position requires office presence of a minimum of 5 days per week and is only located in the location(s) posted. No relocation is offered.
AT&T will not hire any applicants for this position who require employer sponsorship now or in the future.
What you’ll do:
The Principal Systems Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for the reliability, security, scalability, governance, and strategic direction of critical enterprise platforms and cloud services. They will design, architect, and evolve enterprise-grade applications, platforms, and integration services by transforming business requirements into resilient technical solutions. Provide technical leadership for Kafka and IXBUS platforms, enabling event-driven architectures, real-time data exchange, and enterprise integration capabilities that deliver scalability, reliability, observability, and operational excellence across cloud and on-premises environments.This role influences engineering, operations, architecture, security, and support teams while driving automation, modernization, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.
- Serve as the senior technical leader and primary platform steward for critical enterprise platforms and cloud services.
- Define and influence platform strategy, technical direction, architecture alignment, and long-term modernization roadmaps.
- Lead cross-functional initiatives across Engineering, Operations, Architecture, Cybersecurity, Support, and business stakeholders.
- Establish and promote engineering standards, operational best practices, automation principles, and platform governance models.
- Own platform reliability, scalability, resiliency, lifecycle planning, operational readiness, and business continuity posture.
- Lead compliance, cybersecurity, access governance, risk-management, and audit-readiness initiatives.
- Drive automation-first approaches across infrastructure, deployments, operational workflows, support processes, and self-service capabilities.
- Provide strategic oversight for CI/CD pipeline governance, release standards, artifact management, infrastructure automation, and deployment maturity.
- Lead observability, monitoring, alerting, logging, and service health strategies to improve operational visibility and reduce incident impact.
- Act as the highest-level escalation point for complex technical issues, major incidents, and platform-impacting events.
- Lead root cause analysis, problem management, corrective action planning, and prevention of recurring issues.
- Guide capacity planning, cloud cost optimization, licensing strategy, technology lifecycle management, and platform sustainability.
- Own disaster recovery strategy, planning, exercises, documentation, and continuous improvement.
- Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, helping raise the engineering maturity of the broader organization.
- Influence decisions without direct authority by building alignment, communicating tradeoffs, and driving consensus.
What you’ll need:
Required Skills
- Deep experience designing, operating, and governing enterprise-scale platforms and cloud infrastructure.
- 7+ years of cloud platforms, infrastructure services, platform engineering, and cloud governance practices.
- Experience with containerized workloads, orchestration platforms, microservices architectures, and cloud-native deployment patterns.
- Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, release automation, artifact management, infrastructure automation, and deployment governance.
- Experience with monitoring, alerting, observability, logging, service health, and operational telemetry strategies.
- Strong knowledge of security controls, access governance, role-based access management, separation of duties, and compliance practices.
- Experience leading platform upgrades, lifecycle management, migration planning, disaster recovery, and resiliency improvements.
- Strong troubleshooting skills across infrastructure, application platforms, integrations, networking, and operational workflows.
- Ability to define standards for SOPs, runbooks, operational playbooks, technical documentation, and support readiness.
- Working knowledge of cost optimization, capacity planning, license management, and technology lifecycle planning.
- Strategic thinker with strong business and technical judgment.
- Proven ability to lead through influence across multiple teams and organizations.
- Strong executive communication, stakeholder management, and decision-framing skills.
- Ability to mentor, coach, and develop engineering talent.
- Strong ownership mindset with accountability for outcomes, reliability, governance, and customer impact.
- Ability to drive alignment across technical, operational, security, and business priorities.
- Calm, decisive leadership during incidents, escalations, and high-pressure situations.
- Strong collaboration skills with Architecture, Development, Operations, Security, Product, and Support teams.
- Ability to simplify complex problems and communicate clear recommendations.
- Commitment to continuous improvement, operational excellence, innovation, and engineering discipline.
Preferred Skills
- Experience leading enterprise platform modernization or transformation initiatives.
- Experience defining platform roadmaps, maturity models, service ownership models, or operational governance frameworks.
- Experience applying AI or intelligent automation to improve support operations, engineering productivity, or customer experience.
- Experience with large-scale compliance programs, cybersecurity scorecards, audit preparation, and remediation tracking.
- Experience leading disaster recovery exercises, business continuity planning, and resiliency validation.
- Experience influencing architecture review boards, technology standards, or enterprise engineering practices.
- Experience managing vendor relationships, licensing strategy, or platform service contracts.
- Experience developing metrics and executive dashboards for reliability, cost, risk, and operational performance.
- Experience mentoring technical leads or senior engineers in a matrixed organization.
- Experience driving cultural change toward automation, accountability, reliability, and self-service engineering.
#LI-Onsite Full-time office role.
Ready to join our team?
Apply today.
Our Principal System Engineering jobs earn between $155,400.00 - $261,100.00 USD Annual. Not to mention all the other amazing rewards that working at AT&T offers. Individual starting salary within this range may depend on geography, experience, expertise, and education/training.
Joining our team comes with amazing perks and benefits:
- Medical/Dental/Vision coverage
- 401(k) plan
- Tuition reimbursement program
- Paid Time Off and Holidays (based on date of hire, at least 23 days of vacation each year and 9 company-designated holidays)
- Paid Parental Leave
- Paid Caregiver Leave
- Additional sick leave beyond what state and local law require may be available but is unprotected
- Adoption Reimbursement
- Disability Benefits (short term and long term)
- Life and Accidental Death Insurance
- Supplemental benefit programs: critical illness/accident hospital indemnity/group legal
- Employee Assistance Programs (EAP)
- Extensive employee wellness programs
- Employee discounts up to 50% off on eligible AT&T mobility plans and accessories, AT&T internet (and fiber where available) and AT&T phone
Weekly Hours:
40
Time Type:
Regular
Location:
Alpharetta, Georgia, Bedminster, New Jersey, Dallas, Texas, Middletown, New Jersey, Plano, Texas, USA:GA:Atlanta / 1057 Lenox Park Blvd Ne - Adm:1057 Lenox Park Blvd Ne
Salary Range:
$155,400.00 - $261,100.00
