Principal DevOps Engineer

**Principal DevOps Engineer** **Day Rate Contract** **Galway(Hybrid)** We’re working with a leading global financial services organisation seeking a **Principal DevOps Engineer** to lead the evolution of its cloud, platform engineering and SRE capabilities. The role focuses on **DevOps, GitOps, Kubernetes, AWS, automation, observability and AI\-powered engineering** , with a strong focus on reliability, scalability and developer experience. **Key Responsibilities** * Lead **GitOps and Platform Engineering** adoption across engineering teams. * Design and improve highly available **cloud\-native platforms and distributed systems** . * Drive **CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automation and self\-service developer platforms** . * Improve reliability through **SRE, observability, resilience and chaos engineering** . * Introduce **AI, AIOps and Agentic AI** into development, incident management and operational workflows. * Lead complex production troubleshooting, RCA and cross\-functional incidents. * Establish engineering standards and mentor engineers across DevOps, SRE and cloud. **Key Skills \& Experience** * 5\+ years with enterprise **CI/CD platforms and distributed systems** . * 3\+ years hands\-on **AWS** , including cloud modernisation/migration. * 3\+ years development experience with **Python, Java or Node.js** . * Strong **Kubernetes, Docker and containerisation** experience. * 2\+ years **GitOps** , ideally **Argo CD, Flux CD or equivalent** . * Strong **Jenkins, Ansible and Terraform** experience, plus **AWS CloudFormation** . * Experience with **Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)** and self\-service engineering. * Experience with **Argo Rollouts** or similar progressive delivery technologies. * Strong observability experience across **Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Splunk and OpenTelemetry** . * Strong understanding of **DevOps, SRE, monitoring, logging, alerting, instrumentation and performance engineering** . * Experience improving **scalability, reliability, performance and resilience** in mission\-critical production environments. * Strong **incident management, RCA and troubleshooting** skills, with on\-call experience. **AI / Emerging Technology** * Experience with **GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q, ChatGPT Enterprise, Cursor or equivalent** . * Exposure to **AIOps and Agentic AI** for automation, incident response and operational workflows. * Understanding of **AI governance, security, compliance and responsible AI** . * Experience using **data analytics and visualisation** for operational insights. Reach out to Imran.jiwo@nicollcurtin.com for more information