Principal AI Cloud Systems Engineer

Here at Discount Tire, we celebrate the spirit of our people with extraordinary pride and enthusiasm. Our business has been growing for more than 60 years and now is the best time in our history to join us. We are opening more locations every year and we are always looking for qualified individuals to join us in our growth. We are a company that promotes from within, both in our retail and corporate operations.

Working independently, the Principal AI Cloud Systems Engineer leads the cloud engineering practice with a focus on designing, building, and operating highly available, secure, and scalable cloud platforms across AWS and Microsoft Azure. This role is a senior technical authority who drives standards, automation, and innovation while partnering closely with an agile, cross-functional AI Center of Excellence (AI COE) and product teams. The role embodies company values of integrity, customer focus, growth mindset, and collaboration.The Principal Cloud Systems Engineer is responsible for architecting and governing cloud platforms that support enterprise and AI-driven workloads. This role emphasizes Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD automation, observability, reliability engineering, and cloud-native design. The engineer serves as a mentor and technical leader, influencing platform strategy and enabling teams to deliver resilient, cost-effective, and secure solutions at scale.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Work with other engineering leaders to establish and implement cloud engineering requirements and standards across AWS and Azure.
• Help define, evolve, and approve architectural standards for cloud infrastructure, networking, security, identity, and platform services.
• Design and deliver highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable cloud platforms supporting transactional, data, and AI/ML workloads.
• Drive end-to-end automation using Infrastructure as Code practices.
• Lead multi-account / multi-subscription cloud landing zone design, including networking, identity, governance, and security baselines.
• Architect and guide CI/CD pipelines integrating application, infrastructure, and data deployments.
• Partner with AI COE teams to enable cloud platforms for AI/ML, GenAI, MLOps, data pipelines, and experimentation environments.
• Collaborate with product, SRE, security, data, and operations teams in an agile delivery model.
• Lead the design and improvement of monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability platforms.
• Apply Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and resilience testing.
• Influence platform roadmaps, advocate for new cloud-native services, and assess emerging technologies.
• Mentor and coach cloud and systems engineers throughout the full development lifecycle.
• Act as a senior technical advisor across multiple initiatives and platforms.
• Ensure solutions meet functional, non-functional, security, compliance, and financial requirements.
• Champion continuous improvement, innovation, and operational excellence.
• Maintain strong documentation, knowledge sharing, and design review practices.
• Other duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications

• Minimum of 10+ years of experience in systems and cloud engineering with deep hands-on expertise.
• Strong experience designing and operating production environments in both AWS and Microsoft Azure.
• Proven expertise with Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (preferred), AWS CloudFormation, Azure Bicep / ARM.
• Proficiency in programming and scripting languages commonly used in cloud engineering, such as Python, PowerShell, Bash, or Go.
• Demonstrated experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines using tools such as GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, or similar.
• Advanced knowledge of cloud networking (VPC/VNet, routing, load balancing, DNS, hybrid connectivity).
• Strong background in cloud security including IAM, network security, encryption, secrets management, and zero-trust principles.
• Experience supporting containerized and cloud-native platforms (Kubernetes/EKS/AKS, managed PaaS services).
• Experience enabling data, analytics, and AI/ML platforms in the cloud.
• Deep understanding of Linux and Windows server platforms.
• Strong grasp of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and agile delivery models.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence across all levels of the organization.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively in an agile, cross-functional AI COE environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with MLOps, model deployment pipelines, or AI platform operations.
• Experience with multi-cloud cost management and FinOps practices.
• Industry certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect (Professional), Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or equivalent.
• Experience with enterprise governance frameworks and regulated environments.

Education Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Work Environment

This role is primarily office-based with collaboration across distributed teams. Occasional after-hours or weekend work may be required to support critical initiatives.

Discount Tire provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

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