Who We Are:
Join a team that puts its People First! Since 1889, First American (NYSE: FAF) has held an unwavering belief in its people. They are passionate about what they do, and we are equally passionate about fostering an environment where all feel welcome, supported, and empowered to be innovative and reach their full potential. Our inclusive, people-first culture has earned our company numerous accolades, including being named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list for eight consecutive years. We have also earned awards as a best place to work for women, diversity and LGBTQ+ employees, and have been included on more than 50 regional best places to work lists. First American will always strive to be a great place to work, for all. For more information, please visit www.careers.firstam.com.
What We Do:
Be part of a transformative team that is shaping the way First American builds and delivers world-class technology products that fuel the real estate industry. We are looking for the best-of-the-best technology experts who will envision, design, build, and deliver innovative solutions that provide exceptional experiences and lasting value to our customers.
First American is seeking principal engineer candidates to grow our team. An ideal candidate has strong technical expertise, a product mindset, and takes a hands-on approach to building high-quality, sustainable software products. As a principal engineer in the Platform Engineering team, you will play a critical role in shaping and scaling our enterprise observability and security solutions.
What You'll Do:
- Design and Architecture: Lead the design and evolution of the enterprise observability platform and security platform ensuring it is scalable, resilient, and aligned with organizational goals.
- Platform Advocacy: Partner with development teams to drive adoption of foundational tools and practices. Act as a trusted advisor to help teams improve system security, reliability, stability, and performance.
- Monitoring and Alerting: Define and implement robust monitoring, alerting, and self-healing mechanisms to proactively detect and resolve issues across distributed systems.
- Security and Code Quality: Collaborate with application teams to identify and remediate code-level vulnerabilities, contributing to a stronger security posture.
- Instrumentation and Tracing: Build reusable modules and libraries to enable seamless instrumentation and distributed tracing using OpenTelemetry (Otel), helping teams visualize and analyze call paths effectively.
- Collaboration and Mentorship: Work closely with cross-functional teams including SRE, security, and product engineering. Mentor junior engineers and contribute to a culture of technical excellence.
- Continuous Improvement: Stay current with industry trends and best practices in observability, DevOps, and platform engineering. Continuously evaluate and improve tooling, processes, and documentation.
What You'll Bring:
- 10+ years of experience as a software engineer.
- Experience driving engineering best practices for high-functioning software engineering teams through effective use of tools and automation.
- Passion and expertise for building large-scale, back-end services and APIs, using modern architectures (Macro / Mini / Micro Services).
- Ability to develop automated workflows for resource provisioning and management.
- A strong understanding of software engineering principles and modern infrastructure operations.
- Ability to build robust, high-scale, generic and reusable solutions.
- Ability to mentor and influence software engineers to share knowledge and improve quality.
- Ability to unblock yourself and help accelerate the team in achieving their goals.
- Familiarity with deployment and observability strategies that support continuous delivery and high availability in a cloud-native environment.
- Experience monitoring and optimizing the performance and cost of resources.
Technical Skills:
- Certifications in Azure and/or AWS (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert) are preferred.
- C# (.NET Core, .NET Framework), TypeScript & React / Node.js or Golang
- Kubernetes.
- Relational (MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (DynamoDB) databases.
- Automated software testing (unit, integration, contract).
- Infrastructure automation tooling such as Terraform, and Ansible.
- Azure Cloud Services: Virtual Machines, Blob Storage, Functions, SQL Database, Kubernetes Service, Queue Storage, Resource Manager, Virtual Network, Entra ID, Policy, Private Marketplace, Blueprint.
- AWS Cloud Services: API Gateway, EC2, ECS, EKS, ECR, EC2 Container Service, S3, Lambda, Application Load Balancer, SQS, SNS, EventHub, ElastiCache, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager, CloudFormation, Route53, VPC PrivateLink.
- Proficient in CI/CD automation tooling, including GitHub Actions, GitLab Pipelines, and Azure YAML Pipelines.
- Extensive experience in designing, implementing, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines to ensure seamless integration and deployment processes.
- Working within a highly regulated industry such as Financial Services or Healthcare.
- Effective communication skills, both verbal and written, with strong relationship, collaborative, and organizational skills.
- Knowledge of security best practices in cloud environments.
- Experience with DevOps practices and tools.
