Principal - Cloud Engineer

Ally and Your Career
Ally Financial only succeeds when its people do - and that’s more than some cliché people put on job postings. We love this stuff! We see our people as, well, people - with interests, families, friends, dreams, and causes that are all important to them. Our focus is on the health and safety of our teammates as well as work-life balance and diversity and inclusion. From generous benefits to a variety of employee resource groups, we strive to build paths that encourage employees to stretch themselves professionally. We want to help you grow, develop, and learn new things. You’re constantly evolving, so shouldn’t your opportunities be, too?
Work Schedule: Ally designates roles as (1) fully on-site, (2) hybrid, or (3) fully remote. Hybrid roles are generally expected to be in the office a certain number of days per week as indicated by your manager. Your hiring manager will discuss this role's specific work requirements with you during the hiring process. All work requirements are subject to change at any time based on leader discretion and/or business need.


The Opportunity
Seeking an innovative, hands-on Principal Cloud Engineer who excels at the intersection of cloud resilience engineering, infrastructure automation, and technical leadership. In this role, you will define and drive enterprise-wide cloud reliability strategy — designing multi-region architectures, leading chaos engineering programs, building recovery tooling, and partnering with application teams to achieve measurable, validated resiliency outcomes in a regulated financial services environment.


The Work Itself
Lead architecture discovery sessions with application, infrastructure, security, and business stakeholders to define recovery objectives, dependency maps, and multi-region requirements
Design multi-region AWS architectures — Active/Active, Warm Standby, Pilot Light, and Backup and Restore — aligned to application criticality, RTO/RPO targets, and compliance requirements
Design and implement AWS Application Recovery Controller (ARC) patterns — readiness checks, routing controls, safety rules, and zonal shift — to enable deliberate, auditable traffic management and verify recovery environments are prepared before any failover event
Evaluate AWS Resilience Hub to identify resilience gaps, map recovery policies, and drive remediation to measurable objectives
Define traffic management and failover strategies using Amazon Route 53, CloudFront, load balancers, API Gateway, and health checks
Design backup and recovery patterns using AWS Backup, S3, RDS/Aurora cross-region capabilities, encryption, and restore validation procedures
Produce architecture decision records documenting service selection, alternatives considered, constraints, and expected outcomes
Define secure AWS landing-zone controls and design IAM roles, permission boundaries, federation, and least-privilege access models for applications, automation, and platform services
Establish infrastructure and application-performance monitoring using Amazon CloudWatch, Dynatrace, and distributed tracing; build log forwarding to enterprise analytics platforms including Splunk; design operational dashboards connecting infrastructure health, security findings, and recovery readiness indicators
Develop FinOps operating models covering account ownership, tagging, chargeback, budgets, and anomaly detection; forecast cloud consumption and build cost-optimization business cases covering rightsizing, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances
Evaluate migration strategy patterns and design migration approaches using EC2, VPC, S3, RDS, CloudFormation, containers, and serverless services aligned to business criticality and RTO/RPO targets
Use AWS Migration Hub, Application Migration Service, and Database Migration Service to coordinate and execute migrations; define data migration, validation, reconciliation, rollback, and synchronization procedures aligned to RTO/RPO requirements with tested cutover plans
Validate migrated workloads through functional, performance, backup, restore, and disaster-recovery testing
Create reusable Terraform modules for VPC, IAM, ECS, RDS, S3, and monitoring; design GitLab CI/CD pipelines with validation, security scanning, plan review, approval controls, and drift detection
Implement blue-green, canary, rolling, and controlled failover deployment patterns; build deployment safety controls including pre-deployment validation, health gates, blast-radius reduction, and automated rollback procedures
Integrate cost-estimation tooling into pipelines and automate account and regional deployment workflows while preserving isolation, least privilege, and clear ownership
Design and run controlled chaos engineering experiments using AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) targeting compute, database, network, and dependency layers with defined hypotheses, abort criteria, and observability instrumentation
Create game days and disaster recovery exercises involving application owners, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and business stakeholders; develop recovery runbooks for AZ impairment, regional degradation, database failure, and capacity exhaustion; establish a recovery-testing calendar covering backup restoration, failover, and failback
Define resilience engineering standards covering dependency mapping and failure-domain analysis; use experiment results to surface single points of failure and drive remediation with risk owners; coach application teams on resilience patterns and operational ownership
Create executive-ready reporting summarizing recovery readiness, experiment coverage, open resilience risks, and reliability trends for leadership
The Qualifications We’re Looking For
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information System, or other relevant field of study preferred
5+ years of hands-on experience in AWS cloud engineering or site reliability engineering in a large-scale, regulated environment
Expert knowledge of AWS reliability services: Lambda, ECS, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, S3, SQS, EventBridge, CloudWatch, Route 53, CloudFront, API Gateway, and VPC networking
Hands-on experience with AWS Application Recovery Controller (ARC), AWS Resilience Hub, and AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) — including readiness checks, routing controls, resiliency scoring, and chaos experiment design across compute, database, and network layers
Experience designing multi-region architectures across Active/Active, Warm Standby, Pilot Light, and Backup and Restore patterns
Expert-level AWS IAM knowledge including least-privilege design, permission boundaries, federation, and Service Control Policies (SCPs)
Proficiency in Terraform for infrastructure as code and strong CI/CD experience with GitLab including pipeline design, OIDC authentication, and deployment safety controls
Experience with AWS migration services: Migration Hub, Application Migration Service, Database Migration Service, and Application Discovery Service
Proficiency in Python for automation and scripting; experience with Amazon CloudWatch, Dynatrace, Splunk, and distributed tracing
Experience with FinOps practices including cost allocation, tagging, rightsizing, Savings Plans, and consumption forecasting
Ability to lead resilience reviews, production readiness assessments, and architecture decisions; strong communication skills to translate technical recovery risks into executive-ready reporting and business outcomes
Comfortable operating as both a principal individual contributor and a technical leader for distributed engineering teams
Preferred Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, or equivalent advanced AWS certifications



How We'll Have Your Back
Ally's compensation program offers market-competitive base pay and pay-for-performance incentives (bonuses) based on achieving personal and company goals. Our Total Rewards program includes industry-leading compensation and benefits plus additional incentives that are designed to meet your needs and those of your family so you can get the most out of your career and your life, including:
Time Away: Program starts at 20 paid time off days in addition to 11 paid holidays and 8 hours of volunteer time off yearly (time off days are prorated based on start date and program varies based on full or part-time status and management level).
Planning for the Future: plan for the near and long term with an industry-leading 401K retirement savings plan with matching and company contributions, student loan pay downs and 529 educational save up assistance programs, tuition reimbursement, employee stock purchase plan, and financial learning center and financial coach access.
Supporting your Health & Well-being: flexible health and insurance options including medical, dental and vision, employee, spouse and child life insurance, short- and long-term disability, pre-tax Health Savings Account with employer contributions, Healthcare FSA, critical illness, accident & hospital indemnity insurance, and a total well-being program that helps you and your family stay on track physically, socially, emotionally, and financially.
Building a Family: adoption, surrogacy and fertility assistance as well as paid parental and caregiver leave, Dependent Day Care FSA back-up child and adult/elder care days and childcare discounts.
Work-Life Integration: other benefits including Mentally Fit Empl