Location: Chicago, IL
Salary: $190,000.00 USD Annually - $240,000.00 USD Annually
Description: We are seeking a
Staff Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to define, own, and execute the infrastructure platform strategy powering our mission-critical SaaS environment. In this senior technical leadership role, you will operate with deep autonomy, serve as the principal infrastructure authority, and set the engineering standards that drive platform excellence across multiple engineering teams.
You will bridge the gap between robust financial software environments and modern, cloud-native scalability. This role requires a unique blend of deep architectural expertise, production-grade software development for platform tooling, and the communication skills necessary to influence engineering standards and business strategy across the organization.
Key ResponsibilitiesPlatform Strategy & Technical Leadership- Drive Roadmap & Strategy: Own the multi-quarter cloud infrastructure platform strategy across multiple engineering teams, aligning technical roadmaps with organizational OKRs and engineering leadership.
- Architectural Authority: Serve as the go-to decision-maker for cloud patterns, landing zones, and engineering standards. Define reference architectures and reusable IaC templates to enable self-service engineering at scale.
- Buy-vs-Build Decisions: Lead technical and vendor evaluations for platform tooling and cloud services, clearly articulating trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Proactive Engagement: Partner with product and engineering leaders early in the solution lifecycle to ensure infrastructure capabilities are designed for scale and resilience rather than retrofitted.
Infrastructure Engineering & Tooling- Build Platforms, Not Just Config: Develop and maintain internal developer platforms (IDPs) and automation tooling that materially improve engineering productivity. You will write production-quality code, not just static configurations.
- Multi-Cloud IaC: Advance enterprise-scale Terraform module development, state management, and multi-environment deployment patterns, focusing on Microsoft Azure as the primary target and AWS as secondary.
- Hybrid Environment Management: Manage and optimize both Windows and Linux server environments within cloud-hosted production systems.
- Operational Excellence: Participate in the infrastructure on-call rotation, leveraging production exposure to inform platform hardening, automation improvements, and resilience investments.
Governance, Security & FinOps- Secure by Design: Partner with security teams to own the platform's security posture, including least-privilege IAM design, secrets management, network segmentation, and threat modeling.
- Regulatory Compliance: Lead cloud security audits and compliance reviews to ensure the infrastructure meets or exceeds stringent financial services standards (e.g., SOC 2, PCI).
- Cloud Economics: Drive FinOps practices across the cloud footprint-handling cost allocation, right-sizing initiatives, waste elimination, and unit economics reporting for executive leadership.
Influence, Mentorship & Culture- Influence Without Authority: Proactively resolve technical conflicts and priority misalignments across product, security, and engineering teams to drive consensus.
- Talent Development: Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, providing technical direction, career guidance, and hands-on coaching to develop the next generation of infrastructure leaders.
- Scale Knowledge: Lead technical design reviews and build a culture of knowledge sharing through robust documentation, runbooks, and internal engineering forums.
- Technical Hiring: Actively participate in the interview process, defining standards and raising the bar for global infrastructure talent.
Role RequirementsMinimum Qualifications- Experience: 8+ years of hands-on experience designing, operating, and scaling distributed cloud infrastructure, with 4+ years acting as a technical lead or principal decision-maker for engineering platforms.
- Cloud Expertise: Deep, production-scale expertise in Microsoft Azure (including advanced Terraform modules, landing zones, and enterprise management groups). Secondary experience with AWS is highly preferred.
- Operating Systems: Strong proficiency in managing both Windows and Linux server environments at scale.
- Programming & Automation: Proficiency in developing production-quality automation and platform tooling using languages such as Python, Go, PowerShell, or Bash.
- Containers & Orchestration: Hands-on experience implementing and operating containerized workloads (Docker, Kubernetes) in a production environment.
- Security & Compliance: Strong security-first mindset with experience in threat modeling, network segmentation, IAM, and regulated compliance frameworks (such as SOC 2 or PCI).
- Communication: Proven track record of translating complex technical architecture, risks, and financial investments into business impact for Director and VP-level stakeholders.
- Education: BS in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred / Bonus Qualifications- Experience with FinOps tooling and cloud financial management.
- Experience scaling large-scale data platforms (Kafka, Postgres, SQL Server).
- Familiarity with service mesh architecture and zero-trust networking models.
- Experience working within Agile delivery frameworks alongside product engineering teams.
Operational Realities- Global Collaboration & Travel: This role is part of a highly collaborative, global team. It requires regular international travel (typically on a monthly or quarterly cadence) for engineering offsites, leadership alignments, and team collaboration sessions.
- Hybrid Work: Enjoy flexibility with a hybrid model balancing remote work with strategic, in-office collaboration for moments that matter.
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