Principal Cloud Platform Engineer

Principal Cloud Platform Engineer

Why You'll Actually Care

District Partners has been engaged by a highly established, technology-forward organization making a meaningful investment in the cloud platform behind a complex national business. The environment is already substantial, but the next phase requires a more senior technical voice who can connect infrastructure, application engineering, automation, and emerging cloud capabilities rather than simply administer what already exists. This is an opportunity to become that technical anchor, staying deeply hands-on while influencing architecture, standards, and how multiple technology teams build together.

The Basics

This is a senior individual contributor role within a distributed infrastructure organization supporting a sophisticated enterprise environment. The position sits alongside experienced cloud, systems, networking, and productivity-platform engineers and reports through infrastructure leadership, with significant interaction across application engineering, security, and other technology teams.

What You'll Be Owning

• Shape cloud architecture and technical standards across a large Microsoft-centric environment, with an emphasis on scalability, resiliency, security, data protection, and cost.
• Advance the container and cloud platform, including Kubernetes architecture, integrations, automation, and the supporting services required to run modern workloads reliably.
• Build and mature infrastructure automation and deployment capabilities, including Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and repeatable patterns for provisioning and change.
• Serve as the technical bridge between infrastructure and application teams, helping translate application requirements into cloud services, integrations, APIs, pipelines, and platform capabilities.
• Influence the technology roadmap by evaluating platform lifecycle, capacity, technical debt, emerging cloud capabilities, and where AI-enabled services can create practical value.
• Lead complex technical problem solving while creating the architecture, documentation, and recommendations needed to improve the environment beyond the immediate issue.

The Environment

This is not a mature platform where the expectation is simply to keep the lights on. You are joining a lean, experienced infrastructure team where this role is expected to bring principal-level technical depth, challenge existing thinking when appropriate, and help multiple technology groups make better architecture decisions. Communication matters as much as technical credibility, including the ability to present complex concepts clearly, influence senior stakeholders, and command a room when the situation requires it.

What You Bring To The Table

• 7+ years of progressive cloud, systems, or infrastructure engineering experience, with senior-level cloud administration or engineering experience as the baseline.
• Deep Microsoft Azure architecture and engineering experience across complex enterprise environments, ideally including 5+ years designing and operating Azure at scale.
• Significant container platform experience, including approximately 5+ years working with Kubernetes and its integration into broader cloud environments.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code experience, with approximately 4+ years using modern provisioning and configuration frameworks.
• Experience connecting application development with infrastructure, including CI/CD, deployment pipelines, APIs, serverless services, automation, and cloud-native integration patterns.
• Strong familiarity with the broader Microsoft cloud ecosystem and the ability to evaluate and adopt new platform, automation, and AI capabilities as they mature.
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder presence. You can translate deeply technical concepts for non-technical audiences, build credibility across teams, and lead a technical conversation in front of senior stakeholders.

A Few Things Worth Knowing

• Compensation: Approximately $145K to $220K base, depending on experience and market, plus additional bonus and/or profit-sharing opportunity.
• Location: Remote anywhere in the United States, with the team distributed across East and West Coast time zones.
• Work Model: Full-time remote.
• Engagement Type: Direct Hire.