Job Profile: DevOps Principal Engineer Tech Lead

Role Overview

The DevOps Principal Engineer Tech Lead provides senior technical leadership across cloud engineering automation and DevOps practices. The role blends hands-on engineering excellence with leadership responsibility to deliver scalable secure and resilient DevOps solutions across global multi-region environments.
The Principal Engineer collaborates with architects product owners QA Security and global engineering teams to define standards guide solution design and mature DevOps capabilities across the program.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technology Leadership & Solution Design

• Architect and implement DevOps solutions including CI/CD containerization IaC and cloudnative designs in Azure.
• Design multistage CI/CD pipelines for complex applications with automationfirst zerotouch principles.
• Lead Helm chart design Kubernetes manifests and release templates for enterprise deployments.
• Drive AKS strategy: lifecycle security networking scaling and multiregion resiliency.
• Ensure alignment with EY reference architectures governance and security controls.
• Evaluate and select DevOps and automation tooling to improve reliability and delivery velocity.
• Lead modernization from classic/legacy pipelines to YAML and GitHub Actions.

2. Delivery Oversight & Engineering Excellence

• Oversee backlog execution ensuring automated build test and deployment processes.
• Drive consistent delivery of DevOps capabilities aligned to defined standards.
• Lead configuration management and environment alignment for multiregion deployments.
• Lead troubleshooting and rootcause analysis of complex deployment or automation incidents.
• Advance DevOps maturity through measurable improvements in delivery and reliability metrics.

3. Governance Standards & Best Practices

• Promote automationfirst GitOps secure SDLC YAML pipelines and shiftleft.
• Implement mandatory scanning secrets management dependency governance and hardening.
• Define standards for branching versioning Helm packaging release governance and promotions.
• Ensure compliance with EY security requirements using SonarQube AquaSec Mend.
• Establish RBAC audit trails and governance across Azure AKS and CI/CD.

4. Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

• Serve as senior DevOps authority for architecture cybersecurity QA and product teams.
• Drive crossteam decisionmaking with clear communication and proactive risk escalation.
• Work with engineering leads to embed DevOps practices and selfservice capabilities.

5. Documentation & Team Development

• Maintain highquality documentation across architecture CI/CD runbooks and dependencies.
• Mentor engineers and promote DevOps maturity across the organization.
• Deliver training on CI/CD Kubernetes automation and DevOps best practices.

MustHave Skills & Experience

Cloud & Infrastructure (Azure) Expert

• 510 years handson Azure experience.
• Deep AKS expertise including cluster design networking security RBAC multiregion deployments.
• Strong knowledge of Azure Networking App Gateway/WAF App Service Functions Logic Apps Storage Azure SQL Traffic Manager Key Vault Service Bus Monitoring suite.

DevOps CI/CD & Automation Expert

• GitHub / ADO: branching YAML pipelines release governance.
• Advanced CI/CD design including platform migrations.
• Docker and multistage Dockerfiles; image optimization.
• Helm expertise (required).
• Terraform or Bicep (preferred); ARM templates.
• Ansible/Ansible Tower (plus).

Kubernetes & Orchestration Expert

• Deployments ingress config maps secrets RBAC network policies.
• HPA/VPA scaling; GitOps tooling (Flux/ArgoCD) preferred.
• Helm Charts expertise (required).
• Service mesh experience (Istio/Linkerd) desired.

Security & Compliance Advanced

• Experience with SonarQube Mend AquaSec.
• Secrets management with Key Vault or Vault.
• Container security and vulnerability management.

Programming & Scripting Proficient

• C# Python or NodeJS (for understanding application build/test requirements)
• Strong scripting in PowerShell Bash or Python.
• Strong YAML proficiency for CI/CD and Kubernetes.

API & Integration Proficient

• REST APIs and integration patterns.
• Automation via Azure GitHub and Kubernetes APIs.

Observability & Monitoring Proficient

• Azure Monitor App Insights Grafana Prometheus.
• Logging and analytics with Log Analytics.
• SRE practices including SLOs SLIs error budgets.

AI Knowledge (Plus)

• Experience with GitHub Copilot AI agents automation opportunities.
• Understanding of AI/ML ops or OpenAI integration (plus).

Preferred Qualifications

Certifications

• Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)

Experience

• Leading global teams across time zones.
• Largescale CI/CD modernization
• SRE and observability implementation.
• FinOps and cloud cost optimization.