Principal Engineer

About the role

Qlay Technologies is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the design, implementation, and evolution of cloud and on‑premise infrastructure for a key client. This contractor position will act as the technical authority across infrastructure, SRE, and platform domains, ensuring high availability, security, and cost efficiency.

Key responsibilities

• Own and evolve the architecture of cloud and on‑premise systems.
• Design and implement highly available, scalable, and secure services.
• Set standards for reliability, observability, performance, and cost optimization.
• Drive initiatives on availability, disaster recovery, and capacity planning.
• Review complex designs, migrations, and incident responses as a technical authority.
• Identify systemic risks and reduce operational and security debt.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise infrastructure engineering practices.
• Collaborate with product, security, and leadership to align infrastructure strategy with business goals.

Required profile

• 6+ years of experience in infrastructure, systems, or platform engineering.
• Deep expertise in at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Strong background in Linux, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing) and distributed systems.
• Extensive experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, etc.).
• Proven track record designing and operating high‑availability production systems.
• Excellent communication and technical leadership abilities.

Required skills

• AWS, GCP, Azure
• Linux administration
• TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing
• Distributed systems design
• Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi
• Docker, Kubernetes
• CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation
• Monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting
• IAM, security best practices, encryption
• Cost optimization and capacity planning