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 live 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

We are seeking a Principal Cloud Engineer to lead the design, engineering, and deployment of foundational AWS cloud platform services for a large-scale, highly regulated financial services environment! This role is a strategic and hands-on leadership position, responsible for core services such as compute, storage, network, edge, load balancer, and enabling the platform for enterprise-wide adoption.

You will architect, engineer, and operationalize AWS Landing Zones, modularized environments, and automated infrastructure deployments, building a robust, scalable, and secure cloud platform foundation. Your leadership will shape DevOps, CI/CD practices, Terraform-driven automation, observability strategies, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices for the bank’s cloud transformation journey.

At Ally, you get a startup feel, but experience the benefits of a company that’s worked out the kinks and is fulfilling its purpose. We’re always evolving and see that as a good thing. From owning our work to seeing its impact in the real world, our team is relentless in finding new ways technology can help make experiences better and help people. We are problem solvers, we value diverse thinking, we support one another, and we challenge ourselves to think bigger in the journey to deliver customer-obsessed tech solutions. To read more about what our tech team does, be sure to visit our tech blog at ally.tech

At this time, Ally will not sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization for this position

The Work Itself

Architect and own the design and delivery of the core AWS foundational services, including VPCs, networking, compute, storage, edge services, DNS, firewalls, load balancing, and more.Define and operationalize enterprise-grade Landing Zones and multi-environment strategies to support regulated workloads.Establish modularized deployment patterns using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines for efficient, scalable environment provisioning.Drive the adoption of DevSecOps and GitOps standard methodologies, integrating cloud automation into software delivery lifecycles.Build and scale Observability frameworks: monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, and SLO/SLA management in alignment with SRE principles.Champion SRE operational models to ensure platform resiliency, scalability, and security, while promoting operational excellence.Collaborate with security, networking, Application, and data teams to create highly available and performant cloud platforms that are within compliance.Provide technical leadership, mentoring, and hands-on support to cloud engineering teams and architects.Drive innovation by staying ahead of AWS service developments, industry trends, and emerging cloud technologies.Contribute to governance processes, including guardrails, compliance, operational controls, and cloud policies for the enterprise.Lead technical diagnosis and solving and post-mortem reviews for platform incidents, continuously improving the resilience of the platform.

The Skills You Bring

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of IT infrastructure and/or platform engineering experience focused on AWS.
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS core services (EC2, EBS, S3, VPC, Direct Connect, Route53, ELB, CloudFront, WAF, or similar).
• Expertise designing and delivering Landing Zones, Control Tower, Account Vending, Environment Factory models, or multi-account architectures.
• Proven expertise in Terraform (Enterprise preferred), Infrastructure-as-Code, or cloud-native automation patterns.
• Strong background in CI/CD tooling (GitLab, Jenkins, CodePipeline, or similar.) and DevOps practices.
• Strong knowledge of observability tooling (CloudWatch, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or similar.) and SRE methodologies.
• Experience with cloud networking and security including transit gateways, hybrid connectivity (VPN, Direct Connect), security groups, NACLs, and firewall policies.
• Exceptional communication and customer management skills with the ability to influence executives, engineers, and business leaders.
• Strong solutioning skills and a mentality of continuous improvement and operational excellence.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS Professional Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer.
• Experience with ServiceNow, Secrets Management, and Privileged Access Management solutions.
• Knowledge of containerized platforms (EKS, ECS, Kubernetes) and serverless services (Lambda, Step Functions).
• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks and security standards applicable to financial institutions.
• Demonstrated success operating in a large, regulated enterprise, ideally financial services, with deep understanding of compliance and governance requirements (e.g., PCI-DSS, SOX, FFIEC).

#LI-Hybrid

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 Employee Assistance Program, subsidized and discounted Weight Watchers® program and other employee discount programs.
• Other compensations: depending on the role for which you are considered, you may be eligible for travel allowances, relocation assistance, a signing bonus and/or equity.
• To view more detailed information about Ally’s Total Rewards, please visit this link: https://www.ally.com/content/dam/pdf/corporate/ally-total-rewards-snapshot.pdf

Who We Are:

Ally Financial is a customer-centric, leading digital financial services company with passionate customer service and innovative financial solutions. We are relentlessly focused on “Doing it Right” and being a trusted financial-services provider to our consumer, commercial, and corporate customers. For more information, visit www.ally.com.

Ally is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, sex, religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy status, marital status, military or veteran status, genetic disposition or any other reason protected by law.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to applicants with physical or mental disabilities. For accommodation requests, email us at hrpolicy@ally.com. Ally will not discriminate against any qualified individual who is capable of performing the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation.

Base Pay Range: $110000 – $180000 USD

An individual’s position in the range is determined by the specific role, the scope and responsibilities of the role, work experience, education, certification(s), training, and additional qualifications. We review internal pay, the competitive market, and business environment prior to extending an offer.

Incentive Compensation: This position is eligible to participate in our annual incentive plan.

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