Principal DevOps Engineer

The Role:

As a Principal DevOps Engineer, you will take full ownership of the DevOps function for the Qubit Fulfillment Platform, a warehouse automation application that operates 24/7 globally. You will design, build, and operate the Azure infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and automation that product squads depend on to release safely and frequently. You will own the tooling and standards that make that possible, from infrastructure as code through to release orchestration and environment provisioning. 

This is an individual contributor role with significant influence. You will set DevOps best practices across the Qubit squads, provide technical guidance to other engineers and to contractors, review infrastructure and pipeline work produced by others, and act as an escalation point for infrastructure and release issues. You will work closely with the Platform team, Site Reliability Engineers, and Senior Software Engineers across the Qubit organization. 

Key Tasks and Responsibilities:  

• Mentor and provide technical guidance to DevOps engineers and contractors, and review the infrastructure and pipeline work they produce 

• Monitor and optimize cloud consumption and application service costs (this position does not have formal budget ownership) 

• Design, build, and operate the platform's cloud infrastructure, primarily on Microsoft Azure 

• Build and maintain automation and internal tooling in C# and Python, and script operational tasks in PowerShell or Bash 

• Define and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform, Bicep, or Ansible, and operate containerized workloads on Kubernetes 

• Configure and troubleshoot platform networking, including TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, NAT, and routing 

• Apply cloud security best practices and keep infrastructure aligned with compliance requirements 

• Implement and maintain secure access and transport using protocols such as SSH, HTTPS, IPsec, and AAA 

• Operate a 24x7 global application to its high availability and uptime targets 

• Design and operate CI/CD pipelines and release automation for gradual, multi-service deployments, using Azure DevOps, CircleCI, and Octopus Deploy 

• Build and maintain observability and centralized logging with tooling such as New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana 

• Participate in on-call rotation and incident management, lead root cause analysis, and run post-mortem reviews 

• Manage, patch, and harden both Linux and Windows environments 

• Design, develop, and manage global multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and the data services behind it, including PostgreSQL and Elastic Cluster 

• Apply distributed systems and algorithmic fundamentals to platform design decisions 

• Troubleshoot and resolve issues across cloud-based processes and services 

• Act as the escalation point for complex infrastructure and release issues 

• Collaborate with product squads, the Platform team, and Site Reliability Engineers to deliver cloud solutions 

• Communicate technical concepts and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders 

• Own problems end to end, set DevOps standards and architecture guidance across the Qubit squads, and execute with minimal oversight 

• Manage Disaster recovery 

Key Qualifications: 

• 10+ years of relevant experience in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, or platform engineering. 

• Proven ability to scale cloud infrastructure from proof of concept through high production volume and availability 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field. A master's degree is preferred, but not required. 

• Proven ability to mentor engineers and to establish DevOps standards and best practices across squads, including reviewing infrastructure and pipeline work produced by others 

• Excellent communication and relationship-building skills