Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Amtrak is a leading transportation company that connects businesses and communities across the United States. They are seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer who will be responsible for ensuring the resilience, scalability, and security of digital platforms while driving architectural decisions and mentoring engineers.
Responsibilities
- Architect progressive delivery (canary/blue-green/feature flags) of DevSecOps CI/CD pipelines
- Automate rollback/fail-forward and release evidence capture
- Standardize quality gates (tests, perf/chaos pre-prod)
- Publish hardened base images and golden IaC modules with guardrails
- Enforce k8s/RBAC, network policies, quotas; secret standards
- Design multi-env promotion workflows with policy checks
- Establish SLOs/error budgets; drive cross-team reliability improvements
- Bake runbooks into alerts; add synthetic/load tests to pipelines
- Lead major incidents; land systemic fixes (not just patches)
- Enforce short-lived creds, zero-trust patterns, and attestation/signing
- Automate compliance checks and evidence collection
- Partner with security on threat-modeling for platform changes
- Create internal libraries/CLIs with telemetry and docs
- Measure automation ROI (time saved, error-rate drop)
- Orchestrate complex workflows (e.g., Step Functions/Argo Workflows)
- Own a platform capability end-to-end (roadmap, SLAs, upgrades)
- Drive adoption of best practices across multiple teams
- Write ADRs and decision logs that clarify trade-offs
- Define/validate RPO/RTO; automate restore drills and reports
- Tune critical paths for latency/throughput and cost
- Forecast impacts of migrations; deliver measurable cost/perf wins
Skills
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical discipline
- At least 5 years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering roles with leadership experience in automation and infrastructure reliability
- 3+ years hands-on experience in high-availability production environments with cloud-native security and observability tooling
- Master's degree in Computer Science or equivalent
- Certifications: AWS DevOps Engineer Pro, Terraform Associate, CKA, or SRE-focused credentials
- Experience with developer portals (e.g., Backstage), service mesh (e.g., Istio), and security tooling (e.g., Vault, Falco, Trivy)
- Knowledge of DORA metrics, reliability KPIs, and engineering effectiveness measurement frameworks
- Background in regulated environments (e.g., PCI, HIPAA, FedRAMP) with experience implementing security automation at scale
Benefits
- Health, dental, and vision plans
- Health savings accounts
- Wellness programs
- Flexible spending accounts
- 401K retirement plan with employer match
- Life insurance
- Short and long term disability insurance
- Paid time off
- Back-up care
- Adoption assistance
- Surrogacy assistance
- Reimbursement of education expenses
- Public Service Loan Forgiveness eligibility
- Railroad Retirement sickness and retirement benefits
- Rail pass privileges
- Short-term incentive bonus based upon factors such as individual and company performance that is commensurate with the level of the position
- Geo-pay differential to be applied to the employee’s base salary depending on an employee’s assigned worksite or location
Company Overview
Amtrak is a provider of intercity passenger rail services across the country, connecting major cities and regions. It was founded in 1971, and is headquartered in Washington, District of Columbia, USA, with a workforce of 10001+ employees. Its website is https://www.amtrak.com/.Company H1B Sponsorship
Amtrak has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 12 in 2026, 57 in 2025, 40 in 2024, 50 in 2023, 52 in 2022, 42 in 2021, 34 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.