Principal Application Engineer – SRE

Principal Application Engineer – SRE

Requirements

• Bachelors – Computer Science, Engineering, Informatics, Information Security, Information Technology or related
• 6+ Years — Information Technology, (Software) Engineering, or related
• Internal applicants only: technical proficiency rating of proficient on the Dreyfus engineering scale

Responsibilities

• Creates technology solutions addressing high impact business priorities.
• Demonstrates the ability to analyze, design, code, test and deploy solutions and product features with high quality to production.
• Participates in strategic technology decisions and understands how these decisions impact Discover as a whole.
• Proactively identifies and mitigates issues based on intuition and experience in multiple domains.
• Is a thought leader amongst team members and drives problem solving to determine root cause.
• Coaches technology communities at Discover in areas of specific technology domain, design-thinking, agile software development way of working, security, architecture and/or data engineering.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong coding in Python and Java with automation experience.
• Deep knowledge of RHEL Linux including performance optimization and troubleshooting in production environment.
• Experience with SAN, NAS, NFS and object-oriented solutions for low-latency applications.
• Distributed Data System like Hadoop, Apache Kafka/Nifi for real time steaming, ingestion and processing.
• Expertise in Terraform or Ansible to ensure compliance-driven deployments.
• Deep understanding of AWS and on-prem infrastructure, prefer AWS Solution architect Certification.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift for container orchestration in regulated environments.
• Strong grasp of Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD with controls for change management.
• Expertise in Splunk, Datadog ensuring real-time fraud/anomaly detection.
• Proven ability to lead incident resolution, post-mortems (PIR) and disaster recovery (BCP/DR).
• Experience with low-latency, high-throughput systems critical Debit/Credit Card payments.
• Expertise in SQL (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra) with strong consistency requirements.
• Strong grasp of encryption, Identity & Access Management IAM, firewalls and other tools.
• Familiarity with SOX, PCI DSS, FFIEC and other financial regulations.
• Experience working with SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST frameworks.
• Implementing audit trails, logging policies, and real-time security event monitoring.
• Ensuring encryption at rest/in transit, data retention policies, and GDPR compliance.
• Experience with multi-region failover, active-active architectures, and BCP testing.
• Ability to lead real-time financial outages, minimizing downtime.
• Work with compliance, risk, security, and business teams to align SRE strategies.
• Defining SLOs for transaction processing, market data feeds, and payment networks.
• Driving cost efficiency in cloud & infrastructure while ensuring regulatory compliance.
• Driving self-healing infrastructure, reducing operational toil, and enforcing compliance through automation.