Principal DevOps Architect

Job title: Principal DevOps Architect Job type: Permanent Salary: $155,000 - $190,000 Role Location: Remote, US Visa requirements: Not specified The Company Our client is a global leader and rapidly growing SaaS technology company that provides comprehensive software solutions to the clinical research industry. Their vision is to reshape the global clinical research industry with innovative solutions that help advance medicine and save lives. Their cloud-based solutions are dedicated to solving complex problems and simplifying clinical research processes to be more organized, efficient, and cost-effective. They are based out of San Antonio, TX, but are truly a remote and telecommuting company. Role And Responsibilities The Principal DevOps Architect is the senior technical authority for the cloud platform that runs our client's global, multi-tenant clinical-trial services, and drives our client's adoption of infrastructure as code and AI tooling. This is a hands-on individual-contributor architect role rather than a people-management role: the successful candidate will design the platform architecture, set the standards and reference implementations other teams build on, and still write Terraform, build pipelines, and stand up the AI platform themselves. They will define how reliability is measured against SLOs, how releases ship, and how the AI/ML platform is built and governed, and will keep the environment HIPAA-compliant and SOC 2 Type 2 audit-ready. They will influence products, software, and QA through architecture and example rather than direct authority. Technical Leadership & Architecture Own the platform architecture and technical roadmap for infrastructure, deployment, observability, and the AI platform, and advise the VP of Software Architecture and engineering leadership. Set the engineering standards, patterns, and golden paths for infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and AI tooling, and drive their adoption through reference implementations and architecture reviews. Act as hands-on technical authority and mentor to engineers across teams, leading by example in code, infrastructure, and incident response, without direct management responsibility. Drive our client's move to infrastructure as code and AI tooling and prevent uncontrolled spread of unvetted AI tools. Recommend build/buy decisions for platform tooling and evaluate vendors, with final decisions owned by the VP and CTO. Infrastructure as Code & Cloud Platform Manage all cloud infrastructure as code in Terraform as the single source of truth: reusable modules, remote state, peer-reviewed infrastructure pull requests, drift detection, and automated plan/apply in CI/CD. Enforce policy-as-code (for example, OPA or Sentinel) so infrastructure changes meet security and cost guardrails before they merge, with separation between the author and approver of a change. Design and deploy AWS infrastructure for performance, availability, recoverability, and security across development, UAT, staging, and production, meeting the CIS Critical Security Controls. Maintain and improve the multi-tenant database and hosting architecture in a cloud-hosted environment, including replication and per-tenant isolation. CI/CD & Release Engineering Build and operate CI/CD pipelines for large-scale applications on AWS using GitHub Actions or equivalent, with automated build, test, and deployment. Own release management and rollback: safe deployment strategies (blue/green, canary), fast and reliable rollbacks, and release gates for QA and customer acceptance. Package and run containerized workloads on Docker and Kubernetes (EKS), and automate configuration with tools such as Ansible and Packer. Reliability & Observability Lead the SLI/SLO/SLA program and manage error budgets to balance reliability against delivery speed. Operate modern observability using cloud-native tooling and OpenTelemetry (metrics, logs, and distributed traces) to drive down MTTD and MTTR. Analyze production events to improve reliability, operability, and customer experience, and lead blameless post-incident reviews. Participate in on-call rotations, triage and resolve incidents, and provide workarounds or escalation to service owners. AI / ML Platform Operations Provision and operate the AI/ML platform, including Anthropic Claude models served through AWS Bedrock and, where used, the Anthropic API, along with inference endpoints and our client's internal MCP services, all managed as infrastructure as code. Build guardrails and observability for AI workloads: prompt and response logging, rate limits, model and token cost controls, and usage auditing across Claude and any other models in use. Enforce the data boundary for AI systems so Protected Health Information is handled only through approved, BAA-covered providers (AWS Bedrock under the AWS BAA, and Anthropic under an Anthropic BAA where the Anthropic API is used), and confirm no PHI leaves the compliant boundary. Operate and support the agentic and MCP tooling used across engineering and operations (for example Claude Code and internal MCP services) and govern how that tooling accesses code and data with least-privilege tool access and human-in-the-loop escalation. Stand up LLMOps practices: prompt versioning and regression detection, evaluation frameworks for non-deterministic output, token-level cost attribution, and audit logging of agent actions. Route inference across a multi-provider model portfolio and manage protocol choices (such as MCP) to avoid vendor lock-in. Use AI-assisted tooling to accelerate operations where appropriate, such as incident triage, runbook generation, and log analysis. Security, Compliance & Cost Operate and evidence the platform controls required for SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA continuously and support external audits. Own secrets management so no credentials, keys, or tokens live in source code, container images, or Terraform state. Run supply-chain s