Principal Cloud Engineer

General information

Ally and Your Career

The Opportunity

We are seeking a Principal Cloud Engineer to lead the design, engineering, and deployment of foundational AWS cloud platform services for a large-scale, highly regulated financial services environment! This role is a strategic and hands-on leadership position, responsible for core services such as compute, storage, network, edge, load balancer, and enabling the platform for enterprise-wide adoption.

You will architect, engineer, and operationalize AWS Landing Zones, modularized environments, and automated infrastructure deployments, building a robust, scalable, and secure cloud platform foundation. Your leadership will shape DevOps, CI/CD practices, Terraform-driven automation, observability strategies, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices for the bank’s cloud transformation journey.

At Ally, you get a startup feel, but experience the benefits of a company that’s worked out the kinks and is fulfilling its purpose. We’re always evolving and see that as a good thing. From owning our work to seeing its impact in the real world, our team is relentless in finding new ways technology can help make experiences better and help people. We are problem solvers, we value diverse thinking, we support one another, and we challenge ourselves to think bigger in the journey to deliver customer-obsessed tech solutions. To read more about what our tech team does, be sure to visit our tech blog at ally.tech

At this time, Ally will not sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization for this position

The Work Itself

The Skills You Bring

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of IT infrastructure and/or platform engineering experience focused on AWS.
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS core services (EC2, EBS, S3, VPC, Direct Connect, Route53, ELB, CloudFront, WAF, or similar).
• Expertise designing and delivering Landing Zones, Control Tower, Account Vending, Environment Factory models, or multi-account architectures.
• Proven expertise in Terraform (Enterprise preferred), Infrastructure-as-Code, or cloud-native automation patterns.
• Strong background in CI/CD tooling (GitLab, Jenkins, CodePipeline, or similar.) and DevOps practices.
• Strong knowledge of observability tooling (CloudWatch, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or similar.) and SRE methodologies.
• Experience with cloud networking and security including transit gateways, hybrid connectivity (VPN, Direct Connect), security groups, NACLs, and firewall policies.
• Exceptional communication and customer management skills with the ability to influence executives, engineers, and business leaders.
• Strong solutioning skills and a mentality of continuous improvement and operational excellence.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS Professional Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer.
• Experience with ServiceNow, Secrets Management, and Privileged Access Management solutions.
• Knowledge of containerized platforms (EKS, ECS, Kubernetes) and serverless services (Lambda, Step Functions).
• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks and security standards applicable to financial institutions.
• Demonstrated success operating in a large, regulated enterprise, ideally financial services, with deep understanding of compliance and governance requirements (e.g., PCI-DSS, SOX, FFIEC). 

How We'll Have Your Back

Ally's compensation program offers market-competitive base pay and pay-for-performance incentives (bonuses) based on achieving personal and company goals. Our Total Rewards program includes industry-leading compensation and benefits plus additional incentives that are designed to meet your needs and those of your family so you can get the most out of your career and your life, including:

• Time Away: Program starts at 20 paid time off days in addition to 11 paid holidays and 8 hours of volunteer time off yearly (time off days are prorated based on start date and program varies based on full or part-time status and management level).
• Planning for the Future: plan for the near and long term with an industry-leading 401K retirement savings plan with matching and company contributions, student loan pay downs and 529 educational save up assistance programs, tuition reimbursement, employee stock purchase plan, and financial learning center and financial coach access.
• Supporting your Health & Well-being: flexible health and insurance options including medical, dental and vision, employee, spouse and child life insurance, short- and long-term disability, pre-tax Health Savings Account with employer contributions, Healthcare FSA, critical illness, accident & hospital indemnity insurance, and a total well-being program that helps you and your family stay on track physically, socially, emotionally, and financially.
• Building a Family: adoption, surrogacy and fertility assistance as well as paid parental and caregiver leave, Dependent Day Care FSA back-up child and adult/elder care days and childcare discounts.
• Work-Life Integration: other benefits including Mentally Fit Employee Assistance Program, subsidized and discounted Weight Watchers® program and other employee discount programs.
• Other compensations: depending on the role for which you are considered, you may be eligible for travel allowances, relocation assistance, a signing bonus and/or equity.
• To view more detailed information about Ally’s Total Rewards, please visit this link: https://www.ally.com/content/dam/pdf/corporate/ally-total-rewards-snapshot.pdf

Who We Are:

Ally Financial is a customer-centric, leading digital financial services company with passionate customer service and innovative financial solutions. We are relentlessly focused on "Doing it Right" and being a trusted financial-services provider to our consumer, commercial, and corporate customers. For more information, visit www.ally.com.

Ally is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, sex, religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy status, marital status, military or veteran status, genetic disposition or any other reason protected by law.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to applicants with physical or mental disabilities. For accommodation requests, email us at [email protected]. Ally will not discriminate against any qualified individual who is capable of performing the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation.