Principal Software Engineering (Reliability and FinOps)

Location: Onsite in Dallas, Texas; Alpharetta or Atlanta, Georgia; Bothell, Washington; Middletown, New Jersey; or Plano, Texas, five days per week. No relocation is offered.

Salary: $155,400–$261,100 USD annual

Company

AT&T Technology Services modernizes enterprise technology through secure, scalable, cloud-enabled, and AI-powered platforms.

What you will do

• Provide principal-level technical leadership for resilient, secure, scalable, and cost-efficient platforms across Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, and hybrid-cloud environments.
• Lead FinOps and infrastructure optimization, including cost allocation, forecasting, rightsizing, commitment optimization, anomaly detection, waste reduction, and savings validation.
• Build policy-driven, closed-loop automation integrated with ServiceNow, Terraform, GitHub, Azure DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and cost-management tools.
• Design generative AI, agentic automation, and event-driven solutions for engineering operations, cost analysis, remediation guidance, reporting, and decision support.
• Advance reliability engineering through observability, service-level objectives, capacity management, performance analysis, incident prevention, readiness, rollback planning, and continuous improvement.
• Lead proofs of concept and production adoption, create reference architectures and standards, resolve complex technical issues, and mentor engineers across cross-functional teams.

Requirements

• 7+ years of progressive experience in systems engineering, cloud engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, FinOps, or enterprise automation.
• Experience leading complex cross-functional engineering initiatives and influencing technical direction without relying solely on direct authority.
• Deep hands-on experience with Azure and/or AWS architecture, networking, compute, storage, identity, monitoring, governance, and cost-management services.
• Strong knowledge of FinOps allocation, tagging, showback or chargeback, budgeting, forecasting, unit economics, commitment management, anomaly detection, optimization, and savings validation.
• Experience optimizing virtual machines, storage, databases, platform services, Kubernetes, and idle or underutilized resources.
• Advanced experience with Python, PowerShell, Bash, REST APIs, JSON, event-driven integration patterns, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or comparable enterprise tooling.
• Hands-on Kubernetes, AKS, EKS, or OpenShift experience, including workload rightsizing, Helm, observability, node lifecycle management, and container cost allocation.
• Experience applying generative AI, prompt engineering, AI assistants, AI-fueled coding, or agentic automation to engineering and operational use cases.
• Strong understanding of reliability engineering, observability, incident management, capacity planning, performance optimization, recovery, change control, operational readiness, secure identity models, and auditable approval controls.
• Ability to analyze cloud cost, utilization, telemetry, and operational data and communicate technical and financial insights to engineers, application owners, finance partners, vendors, and senior leaders.

Nice to have

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Data Science, or Finance.
• FinOps Certified Practitioner or certifications in Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, ITIL, site reliability engineering, security, data, or artificial intelligence.
• Experience with FinOps and optimization platforms such as IBM Turbonomic, IBM Cloudability, Kubecost, Flexera, Azure Cost Management, or AWS Cost Explorer.
• Experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Power Platform, Power BI, Kusto Query Language, Log Analytics, Snowflake, data engineering, anomaly detection, forecasting, or machine-learning pipelines.
• Knowledge of FOCUS, reservation and savings-plan economics, enterprise cost-allocation models, container security, software supply-chain security, vulnerability management, policy as code, and compliance automation.
• Experience integrating cloud automation with ServiceNow change management, configuration management databases, approval workflows, audit evidence, rollback, post-change monitoring, and drift detection.
• Demonstrated enterprise-scale cost savings, reliability improvements, risk reduction, or productivity gains.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time onsite office role with a 40-hour work week.
• Medical, dental, vision, 401(k), paid time off, holidays, parental and caregiver leave, disability, life insurance, and wellness programs.
• At least 23 vacation days and 9 company-designated holidays based on date of hire.
• Tuition reimbursement, adoption reimbursement, employee assistance programs, and supplemental benefit programs.
• Employee discounts of up to 50% on eligible AT&T mobility plans, accessories, internet, fiber, and phone services.
• Applicants requiring employer sponsorship now or in the future will not be hired.