Principal DevOps Engineer

Principal DevOps Engineer (Principal-level cloud & platform leadership)

Join Headspace Health as a Principal DevOps Engineer to define long-term cloud technical vision, drive platform excellence, and ensure infrastructure is efficient and ready for growth.

Key missions

• Define and refine cloud strategy: Set the long-term technical direction for the cloud platform and advise leadership on architectural strategy, investment priorities, and systemic risks.
• Set org-wide reliability standards: Establish standards for cloud reliability, observability, and operational excellence, including SLO/SLI frameworks, incident management practices, and the platform tools that enable them.
• Serve as senior solutions engineering authority: Partner with teams to translate cross-functional requirements into platform strategy and lead prioritization of developer experience investments.

Responsibilities & expectations

• Act as a solutions engineering partner across teams to discover needs, set priorities, and deliver platform capabilities that reduce toil and increase engineering velocity.
• Own and evolve Terraform/IaC platform leadership: module strategy, policy-as-code, and self-service provisioning standards that scale across teams with different infrastructure maturity.
• Provide expert AWS architecture across:
  • Compute: EC2, ECS, Lambda
  • Networking: VPC, Transit Gateway, Route 53, CloudFront
  • Data: RDS, S3
  • Security: IAM, Secrets Manager, Systems Manager
• Define CI/CD governance models and organizational delivery philosophy (standards and self-service patterns), rather than only implementing pipelines.
• Communicate at the executive level: translate infrastructure risk and platform strategy into business-aligned narratives for Director/VP audiences and drive alignment without formal authority.
• Translate business goals into multi-year platform roadmaps, sequencing by strategic impact and building the case for long-horizon investment.
• Mentor Staff/Senior engineers and build org-wide standards, with strong documentation rigor.

Requirements

• Proven experience partnering with teams on solutions engineering and improving developer experience.
• Expert Terraform and IaC platform leadership (organizational modules, policy-as-code, self-service provisioning standards).
• 8+ years in cloud platform or infrastructure engineering with demonstrated org-level impact.
• Strong cloud reliability/operational excellence expertise: SLO/SLI, centralized observability, alerting strategy, and production incident lifecycle management.
• Executive communication skills and ability to drive alignment without direct authority.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent.

Nice-to-have

• Experience in healthcare.