Principal Systems Engineer (Service Delivery)

Job Location: Colombo, Sri LankaWork Mode: On-SitePosition SummaryThe Principal Engineer is the senior hands-on technical leader for Service Delivery. This role owns system architecture and end-to-end delivery across complex deployments, acts as the technical design authority, drives technical strategy, mentor engineers, and serves as the escalation point for major incidents. You will work within the PMO team and with cross-functional stakeholders to de-risk delivery, uphold standards, and ensure all implementations meet the project performance and compliance objectives.Key ResponsibilitiesLead architecture/design for multi-site and geo-redundant builds, produce HLD/LLD and approve DLD prior to implementation.Define reference architectures and golden images; drive automation-first approaches for provisioning, configuration, patching, and upgrades.Own technical plans and risk mitigation across staging and production; ensure traceable validation via unit, integration, and UAT test artefacts.Collaborate with engineering and PMO teams to ensure governance, signoffs, change control, and stakeholder alignment.Serve as Tier-3/Tier-4 escalation during Sev-1/Sev-2 incidents; lead incident command, root-cause analysis, and permanent corrective actions aligned to our escalation flows and severity classification.Act as technical owner in pre-sales and delivery phases—clarify requirements, validate assumptions, and translate business goals to system design, working with Sales, Service Excellence, Product Engineering and PMO.Lead technical workshops, design reviews, and formal handovers; represent engineering leadership in change boards and go/no-go checkpoints.Ensure high-quality HLD/LLD, runbooks, DR procedures, and security hardening guides are current and version-controlled; institutionalize standards across project delivery teams.Mentor Systems Engineers and Seniors; set technical bar, review designs, code/scripts, and guide career development and cross-training.Drives cross-functional collaboration with Sales, Service Excellence, Product and Customer teams.Technical Skills and ExperienceLinux (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu): advanced administration, hardening, HA clustering, performance tuning.Networking & Security: switching/routing, firewalls, VLANs, TCP/IP, DNS/NTP/LDAP/SMTP; architecture-level design decisions and security controls.Virtualization & Cloud: KVM, VMware, Hyper-V; AWS/Azure/GCP architectures, cost/performance trade-offs, and hybrid designs.Data & Observability: MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL; logging/metrics/alerts (e.g., syslog-ng, Elastic).Automation: Bash/Linux shell; exposure to Python/Ansible/Terraform; CI/CD for infra changes.Containers: Docker/Swarm/Kubernetes for packaging and orchestrating services at scale.Hands-on implementations may be required for critical projects.Requirements10+ years in systems engineering; 3+ years leading architecture or serving as principal/lead engineer on complex programs.Preferred certifications: RHCE, AWS/Azure Architect, Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD), and relevant network/security credentials (e.g., CCNP).Willingness to travel for onsite implementations and cutovers when required.Strong leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.