Associate Principal Engineer - Cloud Platform

Summary/Job Purpose

The Associate Principal Engineer – Cloud Platform will support the design and creation of cloud-based products and services to meet the technology needs of Exelixis. This position will help define and design our cloud platform, which includes cloud automation tools and standards, CI/CD pipelines, DevOps tooling and AWS account provisioning automation. This position will also work with application support teams to re-define the interface between our cloud platform products and application installation and configuration processes.

Essential Duties/Responsibilities

Product Strategy & Product Road Map

• Supports the translation of overall direction and strategy and communicates across organizational levels and functions.
• Works toward long-range goals and objectives.
• Assignments are primarily self-initiated.
• Understands key business processes and business areas.
• Acts as resource and provides direction to others.

Product Development & Delivery

• Guides the successful completion of major initiatives or programs and leads large complex projects.
• Refine end-to-end development processes, from ideation through CI/CD, security scanning, and production monitoring.
• Determine and pursue courses of action necessary to obtain desired results.
• Work on unusually complex technical problems and provide solutions which are highly innovative and ingenious.
• Develops and applies complex and often long-term strategies on specific projects.
• Act as the technical expert to be sought for guidance on new technology direction.

Stakeholder Management & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Translates overall direction and strategy and communicates across organizational levels, to influence executives when needed.
• Leads strategic initiatives and ensure successful executions.
• Act as organization spokesperson on advanced projects and/or programs.
• Acts as advisor to management and customers on advanced technical research studies and applications.
• Interacts with senior external personnel on significant technical matters often requiring coordination between organizations.

Operational Excellence, Quality & Compliance

• Own the oversight of documentation of infrastructure and work instructions for systems and applications.
• Develop approaches and implement solutions to mitigate future incidents.
• Ensure that completed work delivers long-term value and enhances platform performance to maintain maximum functionality.
• Make decisions regarding access, permissions, and security controls across systems.

Subject Matter Expertise

• Serve as the SME for general engineering issues and platform strategy.
• Mentor and coach engineers across the team, fostering technical excellence.
• Keep abreast of industry trends and evaluate platform needs for future growth.

Supervisory Responsibilities

No supervisory responsibilities.

Education/Experience/Knowledge & Skills

Education: Master's degree in a relevant field and 9 years of experience; or Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field and 11 years of related experience; or Equivalent combination of education or years of experience. Technical certification may be required.

Experience: At least 10 years of experience in cloud infrastructure in a highly available and production environment. Experience working in a SOX and FDA regulated environment is a plus.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Advanced level knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS), especially with services related to hosting: EC2, RDS, Systems Manager, IAM, etc.
• Advanced level knowledge with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools, especially Terraform.
• Intermediate level knowledge with cloud and infrastructure automation.
• Intermediate level knowledge of modern development and deployment practices of continuous integration and continuous deployment.