Principal Cloud Platform Engineer I
McKinsey & Company · São Paulo, Brazil · 1d ago
Staff / Lead / PrincipalOn-siteDevOps, SRE & Infrastructure
You’ll join a high-impact internal engineering team that builds, operates, and scales the next generation of digital tools used across the firm.
This is not a DevOps, SRE, infrastructure or data/ML engineering role. You must have built and owned the applications, not the platform they run on.
Who you'll work with
You are someone who thrives in a high-performance environment, bringing a growth mindset and entrepreneurial spirit to tackle meaningful challenges that have a real impact.
In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we’ll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities to help you quickly broaden your expertise, grow into a well-rounded professional, and contribute to work that truly makes a difference.
When you join us, you will have:
- Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
- A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
- Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
- Exceptional benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.
What you'll do
Your mixture of strong software engineering, cloud and platform expertise, and a production-reliability mindset will serve you well with your multi-faceted responsibilities.
You will build high-quality applications, understand the infrastructure they run on, and know what good looks like in production.
You don't need to be an AI/ML specialist, but AI coding agents and assistants are a core part of how you design, build, test, debug, document, and operate software - and you bring the judgment to know when to rely on them, how to verify their output, and how to raise the bar for AI-assisted work across a team. You're equally comfortable building AI-enabled capabilities into the products themselves, with the discipline to ship them safely and cost-effectively.
You will help lead end-to-end delivery of internal products and platforms, influence technical direction, advocate for firm-standard platform components and golden paths, and partner with CSM and McKinsey Tech Ecosystem teams to drive adoption of shared services across the ecosystem. Your expertise will play a key role in solving complex technical challenges and shaping the evolution of our internal platforms.
You will own production-grade applications and the cloud-native infrastructure they run on, from architecture through to production. AI agents take on much of the hands-on implementation, while you set the direction, verify the output, and decide when the work is ready to ship. You are a DevSecOps practices champion with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, GitOps-based Kubernetes deployments, automated security scanning, monitoring and alerting, and production support.
Your background
- Years of software development experience, including designing and delivering cloud-native solutions in production
- Demonstrated experience leading technical initiatives, influencing stakeholders, and mentoring engineers
- A small CTO mindset: comfortable running several workstreams in parallel, making architectural trade-offs, and owning outcomes end to end rather than individual tasks
- Fluency with AI coding agents and assistants (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) as a core part of daily engineering work: designing agentic workflows, breaking complex problems into tasks agents can execute well, and driving the work through to completion, with strong engineering judgment and full ownership of the output
- A clear view of what production ready means across security, reliability, performance, cost, and maintainability, and the discipline to hold AI-assisted work to that bar before it ships
- The technical depth to make sure AI is building the right tool at the right layer: challenging designs, catching the wrong abstraction early, and correcting course before rework gets expensive
- Strong foundation in Programming (Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, and/or Go), with the ability to architect, review, and validate production-grade applications and services
- Proven ability to architect and operate scalable, secure cloud-native applications, preferably on AWS, with a strong grasp of core cloud concepts
- Strong command of modern web application and API architecture, including React, Node.js, and the design of secure, scalable, and performant RESTful APIs
- Strong understanding of SQL and NoSQL database concepts, data modeling, performance, and trade-offs; experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, or similar
- Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines and GitOps-based delivery (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, CircleCI, or similar), and a strong understanding of infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, or similar) and the systems being automated, whether the code comes from you or from an AI agent
- Skilled in GitHub workflows, version control, code review (including reviewing and validating AI-generated code), and technical documentation