Principal Engineer

About the Team:

As Principal engineer in the Engineering CoE you play a critical role in driving and enforcing a robust platform engineering structure and culture. This role focuses on pushing standards and complexity into platforms rather than shifting them left to developers. Thereby increasing productivity and reducing the cost of compliance. We want policy as code and compliance by design. As a leader you will champion the implementation of shared responsibility models, ensuring clear delineation of duties between development, platform, and security teams with a focus on maximum productivity and fast issue resolution. A strong focus on compliance and policy as code will be paramount, ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements like GDPR, HIPAA, and industry best practices. Hence securing platforms and applications is a fundamental practice, requiring deep understanding of security best practices and network architectures.

The Engineering CoE aims for driving cost efficiency throughout the cloud infrastructure, moving beyond lift-and-shift strategies to truly cloud-native solutions. The cloud is elastic so we should make use of that. The Engineering CoE aims to strengthen Swiss Re practices in areas such as Automating testing, deployment, and configuration management that allows engineers to focus on strategic tasks like design and monitoring. As our principal platform engineer your expertise, and skills are critical to this success. The Engineering CoE defines the development standards for SwissRe and being an advisor to Platform engineers that prioritize reliability, cost efficiency and disaster recovery best practices in their designs to ensure scalability and handle expected loads while ensuring we optimize usage of SwissRe platforms.

About the Position:

Key Responsibilities:

• Shared Responsibility Models: Define and implement clear shared responsibility models, ensuring accountability across teams for infrastructure, platforms and application security and reliability.


• Compliance and Policy as Code: Create roadmaps to embed our SDLC into code together with the platform teams, Maintain the process of compliance and policy as code solutions. Standards embedded into platforms enables standard engineering metrics - these are critical for Swiss Re ambition to be a data driven company. You will work with platform teams to ensure we have the proper metrics to steer Technology based on data.


• Security: Work with the security, platform and DevX teams to improve security through standardization while maintaining excellent developer experience with a strong focus on productivity.


• Cost Efficiency: Drive cost optimization across the hybrid cloud infrastructure and platforms, focusing on solutions and resource efficiency.


• Strategy: advice on development and implementation to comprehensive platform engineering strategy, aligning with business objectives and technology trends.


• Championing Platform Engineering: Drive the adoption and implementation of a strong platform engineering mindset and culture across all teams.


• Platform Services: inspire the Development to deliver self-service platforms and products that empower developers with the tools and resources they need to be efficient and productive.

About you:

• Bachelors degree in computer science, similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience.


• 15 years of experience in software engineering leadership roles and building developer-facing products or platforms.


• Minimum 10 years experience with large scale platform engineering with practical hands-on experience in cloud, hybrid and on premise


• Experience in technical leadership, leading global projects and setting technical direction for teams.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience driving engineering excellence through testing, monitoring, and continuous improvement.


• Strong understanding of Agile methodologies and software development lifecycle. Understanding of developer needs, with the ability to translate them into exceptional software tools and experiences.


• Proven and dynamic leader with the ability to set a vision and inspire those around them.