Principle Systems Engineer

Overview

Principal Platform Engineer to help build and scale an Azure-native cloud platform as services migrate from an on-premises data center to the cloud. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with a strong mentoring component, with no direct reports.

What you'll do

• Design and build Azure infrastructure using a cloud native approach, leveraging managed services wherever they meet reliability and cost requirements.
• Lead technical execution of the migration of services from an on-premises data center to Azure, including dependency mapping, migration sequencing, and cutover risk management.
• Operate and extend the AKS-based platform, including GitOps deployment patterns, namespace isolation, and policy enforcement.
• Own and evolve reusable Terraform modules that other engineering teams consume, with clear interface contracts between platform-owned and application-owned infrastructure.
• Build and maintain observability coverage (metrics, logs, alerting) so platform and application health are measurable and actionable.
• Apply policy-as-code to enforce security, compliance, and operational standards across the platform, reducing reliance on manual review gates.
• Design and review Identity and Access Management patterns, including workload identity, least-privilege access models, and secrets management, with a bias away from static credentials.
• Participate in business continuity and disaster recovery planning for platform services, including failover design, RTO/RPO definition, and recovery testing.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipeline design and standards used across engineering teams building on the platform.
• Use AI-assisted engineering tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent) as part of the standard workflow, and evaluate where AI-driven platform capabilities can be responsibly introduced.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code/design review, pairing, and informal technical coaching, including judgment around idempotency, error handling, and migration candidacy when evaluating legacy automation.

What you'll need

• 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or site reliability engineering roles, with demonstrated Principal-level scope (technical leadership without formal management).
• Deep hands-on experience with Azure, building cloud native architectures using managed services rather than defaulting to IaaS.
• Production experience running and operating Kubernetes at scale, ideally AKS specifically.
• Strong GitOps experience (ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent), with all infrastructure and cluster changes tracing to a git commit as a matter of practice.
• Experience leading or significantly contributing to a data center-to-cloud migration, including business continuity and disaster recovery planning.
• Working fluency in policy-as-code tooling (Kyverno, OPA/Gatekeeper, or equivalent) for security and compliance enforcement.
• Strong Identity and Access Management background: workload identity federation, least-privilege IAM design, and secrets management patterns that avoid static credentials.
• Experience building and maintaining an observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos, or equivalent).
• Solid Terraform experience, including designing reusable modules consumed by other teams, not just single-project usage.
• Practical, current experience using AI-assisted development tools in daily engineering work.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor other engineers through review, pairing, or informal technical leadership without formal authority.

Nice to have

• Experience designing or operating hub-and-spoke network architectures in Azure.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipeline design for multi-team, multi-repo environments (e.g., GitHub Actions-based runner infrastructure).
• Exposure to evaluating or building genuinely AI-driven operational tooling (as distinct from rules-based automation mislabeled as AI).
• Experience presenting technical tradeoffs to both engineering and business stakeholders.

Details

• Remote, Pune-Baroda, India.