DevOps Principal Engineer Tech Lead

Role: DevOps Principal Engineer – Tech Lead

Location: Katowice / Wrocław - hybrid

Role Overview

The DevOps Principal Engineer – Tech Lead provides senior technical leadership across cloud engineering, automation, and DevOps practices. The role blends hands-on engineering excellence with leadership responsibility to deliver scalable, secure, and resilient DevOps solutions across global, multi-region environments.
The Principal Engineer collaborates with architects, product owners, QA, Security, and global engineering teams to define standards, guide solution design, and mature DevOps capabilities across the program.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technology Leadership & Solution Design

• Architect and implement DevOps solutions including CI/CD, containerization, IaC, and cloud‑native designs in Azure.
• Design multi‑stage CI/CD pipelines for complex applications with automation‑first, zero‑touch principles.
• Lead Helm chart design, Kubernetes manifests, and release templates for enterprise deployments.
• Drive AKS strategy: lifecycle, security, networking, scaling, and multi‑region resiliency.
• Ensure alignment with EY reference architectures, governance, and security controls.
• Evaluate and select DevOps and automation tooling to improve reliability and delivery velocity.
• Lead modernization from classic/legacy pipelines to YAML and GitHub Actions.

2. Delivery Oversight & Engineering Excellence

• Oversee backlog execution, ensuring automated build, test, and deployment processes.
• Drive consistent delivery of DevOps capabilities aligned to defined standards.
• Lead configuration management and environment alignment for multi‑region deployments.
• Lead troubleshooting and root‑cause analysis of complex deployment or automation incidents.
• Advance DevOps maturity through measurable improvements in delivery and reliability metrics.

3. Governance, Standards & Best Practices

• Promote automation‑first, GitOps, secure SDLC, YAML pipelines, and shift‑left.
• Implement mandatory scanning, secrets management, dependency governance, and hardening.
• Define standards for branching, versioning, Helm packaging, release governance, and promotions.
• Ensure compliance with EY security requirements using SonarQube, AquaSec, Mend.
• Establish RBAC, audit trails, and governance across Azure, AKS, and CI/CD.

4. Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

• Serve as senior DevOps authority for architecture, cybersecurity, QA, and product teams.
• Drive cross‑team decision‑making with clear communication and proactive risk escalation.
• Work with engineering leads to embed DevOps practices and self‑service capabilities.

5. Documentation & Team Development

• Maintain high‑quality documentation across architecture, CI/CD, runbooks, and dependencies.
• Mentor engineers and promote DevOps maturity across the organization.
• Deliver training on CI/CD, Kubernetes, automation, and DevOps best practices.

Must‑Have Skills & Experience

Cloud & Infrastructure (Azure) – Expert

• 5–10 years hands‑on Azure experience.
• Deep AKS expertise including cluster design, networking, security, RBAC, multi‑region deployments.
• Strong knowledge of Azure Networking, App Gateway/WAF, App Service, Functions, Logic Apps, Storage, Azure SQL, Traffic Manager, Key Vault, Service Bus, Monitoring suite.

DevOps, CI/CD & Automation – Expert

• GitHub / ADO: branching, YAML pipelines, release governance.
• Advanced CI/CD design including platform migrations.
• Docker and multi‑stage Dockerfiles; image optimization.
• Helm expertise (required).
• Terraform or Bicep (preferred); ARM templates.
• Ansible/Ansible Tower (plus).

Kubernetes & Orchestration – Expert

• Deployments, ingress, config maps, secrets, RBAC, network policies.
• HPA/VPA scaling; GitOps tooling (Flux/ArgoCD) preferred.
• Helm Charts expertise (required).
• Service mesh experience (Istio/Linkerd) desired.

Security & Compliance – Advanced

• Experience with SonarQube, Mend, AquaSec.
• Secrets management with Key Vault or Vault.
• Container security and vulnerability management.

Programming & Scripting – Proficient

• C#, Python, or NodeJS (for understanding application build/test requirements)
• Strong scripting in PowerShell, Bash or Python.
• Strong YAML proficiency for CI/CD and Kubernetes.

API & Integration – Proficient

• REST APIs and integration patterns.
• Automation via Azure, GitHub, and Kubernetes APIs.

Observability & Monitoring – Proficient

• Azure Monitor, App Insights, Grafana, Prometheus.
• Logging and analytics with Log Analytics.
• SRE practices including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets.

AI Knowledge (Plus)

• Experience with GitHub Copilot, AI agents, automation opportunities.
• Understanding of AI/ML ops or OpenAI integration (plus).

Preferred Qualifications

Certifications

• Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)

Experience

• Leading global teams across time zones.
• Large‑scale CI/CD modernization
• SRE and observability implementation.
• FinOps and cloud cost optimization.