This role is four days onsite at our Seneca One Buffalo, NY location, with the flexibility to work from home one day per week.

Overview:

The Senior Principal Cloud & Platform Engineer is a senior‑level individual contributor responsible for defining, standardizing, and evolving core cloud and platform engineering capabilities used across the enterprise. This role provides deep technical leadership for cloud platforms, engineering standards, and reference implementations that enable application teams to build and operate solutions in a consistent, secure, and scalable manner.

The position operates primarily upstream of delivery execution, focusing on platform design, cloud standards, and technical enablement that reduce complexity and rework across application and migration initiatives. The role partners closely with architecture, security, infrastructure, and engineering teams to ensure platform capabilities align to enterprise technology standards and delivery needs.

This role does not carry people‑management accountability and is grounded in hands‑on technical leadership and applied engineering expertise.

Primary Responsibilities:

Cloud & Platform Engineering Leadership

• Define and influence enterprise cloud and platform engineering strategy, standards, patterns, and technical direction.
• Establish consistent, reusable cloud and platform solutions that can be adopted broadly across application teams.
• Serve as a senior technical authority for cloud platform design decisions, trade‑off analysis, and engineering standards.

Platform Standards & Reference Architectures

• Develop and maintain approved reference architectures, technical patterns, and implementation guidelines for cloud‑hosted applications.
• Establish opinionated but practical defaults for:
  • Cloud service usage
  • Network and ingress models
  • Identity, access, and secrets management
  • Observability, logging, and telemetry
• Ensure standards are practical to implement and aligned with enterprise security and compliance requirements.

Engineering Enablement

• Enable adoption of modern engineering practices by embedding standards and controls into platform capabilities wherever possible.
• Reduce delivery friction and cognitive load for application teams by providing clear guidance, templates, and reusable components.
• Support consistency across teams while allowing appropriate flexibility for application‑specific needs.

Upstream Modernization & Migration Support

• Engage early with application modernization and migration efforts to identify platform or architectural constraints.
• Recommend platform‑aligned remediation and modernization approaches prior to execution.
• Act as a technical advisor to migration and delivery teams without assuming program ownership, delivery tracking, or reporting responsibilities.

Hands‑On Technical Contribution

• Participate directly in:
  • Design and architecture reviews
  • Proofs of concept and technical evaluations
  • Platform pilots and targeted engineering efforts
• Validate that platform standards and patterns are implementable and effective in real‑world delivery scenarios.
• Provide mentorship and technical guidance to senior engineers and platform teams.

Cross‑Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with:
  • Enterprise and solution architecture
  • Cybersecurity and identity teams
  • Cloud and infrastructure engineering
  • Application engineering leadership
• Ensure platform standards are aligned with enterprise architecture, reliability, and risk management expectations.
• Communicate technical decisions clearly to both engineering audiences and senior technology stakeholders.

Scope of Responsibilities:

• Senior individual contributor role with enterprise‑level technical influence.
• No direct people‑management or budget accountability.
• Accountability is measured through:
  • Platform standard adoption
  • Reduction in duplicated or inconsistent cloud solutions
  • Improved application readiness for cloud and modernization initiatives
  • Technical quality and sustainability of platform decisions

Education and Experience Required:

• Combined minimum of 10 years’ higher education and/or experience in systems design, management, and/or architecture

• Thorough understanding of the system development and infrastructure lifecycle and architecture, vendor best practices, IT Service Management, and systems design 

Education and Experience Preferred:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• 7+ years experience in cloud engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering roles
• Demonstrated expertise in:
  • Cloud platforms (Azure preferred)
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • CI/CD and automation frameworks
  • Container platforms and orchestration
  • Observability and operational tooling
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without formal authority
• Experience in large‑scale or regulated enterprise environments
• Exposure to SRE concepts, reliability engineering, or platform resiliency practices
• Experience developing shared platforms or internal engineering

#LI-JB3 #Hybrid

Location