Principal Cloud Engineer

POSITION SUMMARY

This position leads the design, build, operation, and continuous improvement of MSD’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform across manufacturing, commercial, CRO, and SaaS business segments, operating as a player-coach who provides technical direction, sets standards, and develops engineers while remaining deeply hands-on in architecting cloud infrastructure, automating delivery pipelines, and supporting production workloads.

The Principal Cloud Engineer leads the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams and partners closely with company stakeholders, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Systems, Software Engineering, the Methodical Mind product team, and the BAL CRO organization. The role champions automation, secure-by-design infrastructure, GxP and 21 CFR Part 11 alignment, and measurable business outcomes from MSD’s cloud investment.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Lead, mentor, and develop the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams: set technical direction, establish engineering standards and runbooks, conduct performance management and career development conversations, and recruit and onboard new talent.
• Architect, build, and operate MSD’s AWS environment across multiple accounts using AWS Organizations, Control Tower, and a landing-zone reference architecture; design for high availability, security, scalability, and recoverability.
• Stay deeply hands-on: write and review production Terraform, author CI/CD pipelines, debug production incidents, optimize cluster and database performance, and contribute code that the team will live with for years.
• Own and evolve MSD’s Infrastructure-as-Code standard (Terraform preferred; CloudFormation and CDK as needed), including module libraries, state management, branching and review patterns, and integration with CI/CD.
• Operate and extend MSD’s container and compute platforms (Amazon ECS, EKS/Kubernetes, EC2, Lambda, and serverless services) and the cluster-management, ingress, observabili