Principle Systems Engineer

Overview 

The Senior Manager of Altera Cloud Operations & Engineering leads the Azure Operations team and is responsible for ensuring the reliability, performance, and scalability of the organization’s cloud and hybrid infrastructure. This role oversees cloud engineering/environment builds, DevOps practices, operational excellence, and major incident response. The ideal candidate is a strategic technical leader and thinker with exceptional communication skills, the ability to influence at all levels, and a relentless drive for continuous improvement—especially in the stability and quality of automation pipelines.  While this is primarily an internal facing role, the successful candidate will have deep wisdom and knowledge improving the customer experience.   

Key Responsibilities 

Cloud Operations & Engineering Leadership 

• Lead, mentor, and develop a high‑performing team of cloud engineers, DevOps engineers, and operations specialists. 

• Inspire and motivate team members through clear direction, coaching, and recognition. 

• Build a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous learning. 

• Partner with senior leadership, product teams, RnD, security, and infrastructure groups to align cloud strategy with business objectives. 

• Represent Cloud Operations in leadership forums, providing crisp, confident, and actionable communication. 

Change, Incident, and Operational Management 

• Oversee and enforce change management processes to ensure safe, predictable, and compliant deployments. 

• Serve as the primary escalation point for critical incidents, providing calm, decisive leadership during high‑severity events. 

• Actively participate in major incident management, including communication, coordination, and post‑incident analysis. 

• Drive a maniacal focus on corrective actions, ensuring root causes are identified, documented, and permanently remediated to optimize environments and improve build automation and build processes.   

• Ensure operational processes, runbooks, and documentation are continuously improved and rigorously followed. 

DevOps & CI/CD 

• Design, implement, and manage CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps. 

• Standardize build and release pipelines for applications and infrastructure. 

• Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices using ARM, Bicep, Terraform, or similar tools. 

• Ensure pipeline security, artifact management, versioning, and governance. 

• Maintain a laser‑focused commitment to the remediation of pipeline automation failures, ensuring rapid recovery, long‑term fixes, and improved reliability. 

• Champion DevOps best practices across engineering teams. 

Kubernetes & GitOps 

• Manage and support Kubernetes clusters (AKS and/or on‑prem). 

• Implement and maintain GitOps workflows using Argo CD. 

• Deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot containerized applications. 

• Work with Helm charts, manifests, and YAML‑based configurations. 

• Ensure cluster security, scalability, and operational health. 

Cloud & Virtualization 

• Manage Azure cloud resources, subscriptions, policies, and integrations. 

• Support and maintain VMware environments, including provisioning, lifecycle management, and troubleshooting. 

• Contribute to hybrid cloud strategies and cloud migration initiatives. 

• Optimize cloud cost, performance, and resource utilization. 

Operations & Troubleshooting 

• Provide oversight for Windows Server administration (services, event logs, patching, performance tuning). 

• Troubleshoot application, OS, pipeline, and infrastructure issues across cloud and on‑prem environments.