Principal, Systems Engineer

Job Description:

EI Production Services organization is seeking a strategic and proactive leader to serve as a Principal, Systems Engineer. In this role, you will drive operational excellence, observability, and automation for critical contact center applications supporting both Wealth and Workplace Investing business units. You will lead initiatives to reduce toil, improve associate experience, and enhance system reliability through best practices, automation, and continuous improvement. This position requires a self-starter who can identify opportunities, lead cross-functional efforts, and deliver measurable improvements in stability and efficiency.

The Expertise You Have and The Skills You Bring

• 10+ years of experience in technology operations, systems engineering, or production support leadership.
• Proven ability to lead and deliver complex improvement initiatives in large-scale environments.
• Strong background in IT Service Management (ITSM), incident/problem management, and operational process optimization.
• Expertise in observability and monitoring tools (e.g., OTEL, Splunk, DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Experience implementing SLI/SLO/SLAs and reliability engineering practices.
• Familiarity with automation and scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell, or similar).
• Solid understanding of On-Prem and Public Cloud environments (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Experience supporting 24/7, high-availability production environments.
• Knowledge of networking, load balancing, and security fundamentals.
• Agile and DevOps mindset with experience in CI/CD and operational automation.
• Optional certifications: ITIL, AWS, SRE-related credentials.
• Leadership excellence: Ability to inspire, mentor, and guide teams toward operational excellence.
• Strategic thinking: Skilled at identifying top issues and opportunities for improvement.
• Execution focus: Proven track record of driving projects from concept to measurable outcomes.
• Collaboration and influence: Ability to work across engineering, product, and business teams.
• Data-driven mindset: Comfortable using KPIs and metrics to track progress and communicate impact.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Lead initiatives to improve observability, automation, and operational efficiency for critical associate-facing applications.
• Drive proactive monitoring and telemetry to reduce reactive firefighting and improve incident response.
• Partner with engineering and business leaders to prioritize and resolve top issues impacting associate experience.
• Implement automation and self-service capabilities to reduce manual intervention and accelerate resolution times.
• Establish and track SLIs/SLOs to measure and improve reliability and performance.
• Communicate progress and outcomes to senior leadership and stakeholders.