Sr. Staff Engineer - Cloud Engineering

At Early Warning, we’ve powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle®, Paze℠, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Overall Purpose

The Sr. Staff Engineer - Cloud Engineering is a senior technical individual contributor responsible for leading the design, evolution, and operational excellence of Early Warning’s cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities. This role provides deep technical expertise across cloud architecture, reliability, security, automation, and observability, and partners across engineering teams to enable secure, scalable, resilient, and cost-effective cloud-native solutions.

The role works closely with engineering, platform, security, compliance, and architecture partners to solve complex technical challenges and guide implementation decisions as Early Warning continues its multi-year migration of mission-critical applications and data from on-premise environments to AWS. The Sr. Staff Engineer helps establish technical patterns, improves platform consistency, and drives execution on high-impact cloud initiatives that support business growth, developer effectiveness, and operational stability.

Essential Functions

• Leads the design, implementation, and optimization of cloud-native solutions using AWS services such as EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, EKS, IAM, VPC, and related services, with strong focus on scalability, resilience, security, and cost efficiency.

• Design and implement cloud infrastructure solutions that incorporate regulatory, risk, and compliance requirements by applying established security controls and engineering best practices.

• Serves as a senior technical leader for complex cloud engineering initiatives, influencing architectural decisions and implementation patterns across multiple teams.

• Troubleshoots the most complex infrastructure and platform issues, including problems that span multiple systems, services, and layers of the technology stack.

• Leads root cause analysis for significant incidents and drives remediation plans that improve reliability, resiliency, and operational maturity.

• Partners with Security and Compliance teams to ensure cloud environments meet regulatory and policy requirements, including PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FFIEC, and related standards.

• Supports internal and external audit activities by helping prepare evidence, respond to technical requests, and improve readiness of cloud controls and documentation.

• Architects and implements disaster recovery, high availability, backup, and fault-tolerance approaches to improve service continuity and recoverability.

• Implements and reinforces cloud security best practices, including identity and access management, network segmentation, encryption, and key management.

• Drives adoption of infrastructure as code and automation using Terraform and related tooling, and advances CI/CD best practices that improve consistency and speed of delivery.

• Oversees and improves cloud vulnerability management and configuration compliance efforts to help ensure patching and hardening activities meet service expectations.

• Designs and enhances observability solutions for cloud infrastructure and distributed systems, including logging, metrics, dashboards, tracing, and alerting.

• Provides technical leadership in defining delivery plans, sequencing work, shaping backlogs, and following through on design and build activities through production delivery.

• Creates and maintains clear technical documentation, standards, and implementation guidance for cloud infrastructure, services, and operational procedures.

• Mentors engineers and shares expertise to raise engineering quality, strengthen technical decision-making, and improve execution across teams.

• Supports the company’s commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.

Minimum Qualifications

• Education and/or experience typically obtained through a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field.

• Typically has 12 years of experience or demonstrated portfolio consistent with experience required of the role in cloud engineering, DevOps, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, or related technical roles.

• Typically has 4 years of experience or demonstrated portfolio consistent with experience required of the role working hands-on in AWS environments supporting business-critical systems.

• Deep expertise in AWS core services including compute, storage, networking, identity, container orchestration, and managed database services.

• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes, container platforms, Docker, and Linux environments.

• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering large-scale, business-critical systems and cloud platform capabilities.

• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction and work effectively across teams in a collaborative environment.

• Strong knowledge of mature engineering practices including CI/CD, testing, secure engineering, Agile delivery methods, and DevOps practices.

• Proven experience implementing security and compliance controls aligned with frameworks such as PCI-DSS, SOC 2, or FFIEC.

• Experience building and maintaining infrastructure as code using tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or similar technologies.

• Experience building and automating observability solutions at scale for complex transactional systems.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, strong documentation skills, attention to detail, and ability to prioritize effectively in ambiguous situations.

• Background and drug screen required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in computer science, management information systems, or related field.

• Current AWS and/or other relevant cloud certification(s).

• Experience leading complex cloud modernization or migration efforts across multiple teams.

• Experience with monitoring and alerting platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Splunk, or AppDynamics.

• Experience with container and workload security technologies.

• Experience with programming or scripting languages such as Python, C#, Ruby, or Shell.

• Knowledge of ACH/EFT and real-time payment networks, including RTP or FedNow.

• Experience in FinTech, banking, payments, or other highly regulated industries.

The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow instructions and perform other related duties as assigned by their supervisor.

The base pay scale for this position in:
Phoenix, AZ/ Chicago, IL in USD per year is: $150,000 - $200,000.
Additionally, candidates are eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits.

This pay scale is subject to change and is not necessarily reflective of actual compensation that may be earned, nor a promise of any specific pay for any specific candidate, which is always dependent on legitimate factors considered at the time of job offer. Early Warning Services takes into consideration a variety of factors when determining a competitive salary offer, including, but not limited to, the job scope, market rates and geographic location of a position, candidate’s education, experience, training, and specialized skills or certification(s) in relation to the job requirements and compared with internal equity (peers). The business actively supports and reviews wage equity to ensure that pay decisions are not based on gender, race, national origin, or any other protected classes.

Some of the Ways We Prioritize Your Health and Happiness 

•  Healthcare Coverage – Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans as well as company contributions to your Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health & dependent care expenses.

• 401(k) Retirement Plan – Featuring a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on your first 6% deferral immediately upon eligibility.

• Paid Time Off – Flexible Time Off for Exempt (salaried) employees, as well as generous PTO for Non-Exempt (hourly) employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and a paid volunteer day.

• 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave

• Maven Family Planning – provides support through your Parenting journey including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.

And SO much more! We continue to enhance our program, so be sure to check our Benefits page here for the latest. Our team can share more during the interview process!

Early Warning Services, LLC (“Early Warning”) considers for employment, hires, retains and promotes qualified candidates on the basis of ability, potential, and valid qualifications without regard to race, religious creed, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, protected veteran or disability status or any factor prohibited by law, and as such affirms in policy and practice to support and promote equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and municipal laws. The company also prohibits discrimination on other bases such as medical condition, marital status or any other factor that is irrelevant to the performance of our employees. 

Early Warning Services LLC is a proud participant in E-Verify, a federal program to help ensure a legal and authorized workforce. As part of our hiring process, we electronically verify the employment eligibility of all new hires through E-Verify. For more information on your rights and responsibilities under E-Verify please visit Home | E-Verify.