Principal Engineer - Resiliency

Principal Engineer - Resiliency

ForeFlight is redefining the future of aviation technology - equipping pilots, operators, and decision-makers with the software tools to forge bold new digital paths that push past the expected. We stand with those who dream bigger, fly farther, and seek to explore the next frontier in the cockpit and operations center. The role is preferred as Hybrid working in Austin TX, Houston TX or Denver CO, we will consider virtual for the right candidate.

Position responsibilities

• Own the resiliency strategy and reference architecture for the AWS estate: set availability targets by service tier, define the standard patterns for multi-AZ and multi-region operation, and drive existing services toward them
• Own the decision framework for active-active versus active-passive versus warm-standby and pilot-light topologies, including the real tradeoffs in cost, operational complexity, and achievable RTO/RPO, and the migration path for services that need to move between them
• Lead business continuity and disaster recovery end to end: RTO/RPO target-setting, automated failover design, regular DR exercises and game days, recovery runbook ownership, and translating exercise findings into durable architectural change
• Run AWS Well-Architected Reviews across service teams with emphasis on the Reliability and Operational Excellence pillars, and convert findings into a prioritized, tracked remediation backlog rather than a report that sits on a shelf
• Drive resiliency into the container platform: ECS/Fargate and EKS workload placement, capacity headroom, failure-domain isolation, graceful degradation, and recovery behavior under partial-region impairment
• Drive resiliency into the data tier so stateful workloads recover as predictably as stateless ones, covering Aurora and RDS multi-AZ and Global Database topologies, DynamoDB global tables, ElastiCache, and S3 cross-region replication, with clear expectations for failover time, replica lag, and data-loss boundaries
• Encode resilience in automation: IaC-defined failover paths, self-healing and auto-remediation, drift detection, and continuous fault injection so recovery capability is exercised routinely instead of documented once
• Own the reliability signal set for core infrastructure: SLOs and error budgets, health-check and failover-trigger design, dependency mapping, and blast-radius analysis across control-plane and data-plane signals
• Raise the quality bar on incident response for availability events, lead resiliency-focused postmortems, and convert repeat failure modes into architectural fixes and platform guardrails
• Operate effectively across a complex organizational context, translating continuity and availability requirements from engineering, product, and business stakeholders into concrete AWS design and validated recovery capability

Required skills

• 12+ years of engineering experience, with at least 7 as the primary architect or technical owner of infrastructure resiliency and high-availability architecture at scale
• Deep hands-on AWS production experience in large multi-account, multi-region environments, including VPC and networking design, Route 53, ALB/NLB, Global Accelerator, and the IAM and account-boundary decisions that constrain failover
• Demonstrated ownership of highly available architectures where multi-AZ is the baseline and multi-region is real for critical workloads, with credible judgment about when active-active is warranted and when active-passive or warm-standby is the better tradeoff
• Track record owning BC/DR strategy end to end: setting RTO/RPO targets, designing and automating regional failover, and running genuine recovery exercises rather than tabletop-only reviews
• Expert command of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, particularly the Reliability pillar, with experience leading formal reviews and driving the resulting remediation to completion
• Production depth with container platforms on AWS (ECS/Fargate, EKS, or both): scaling behavior, placement and failure domains, deployment safety, and degradation characteristics under failure
• Strong data-tier resiliency experience with Aurora or RDS (multi-AZ, Global Database, failover behavior, replica lag) and at least one of DynamoDB global tables, ElastiCache replication, or S3 cross-region replication
• Deep production experience designing and operating IaC at scale, Terraform preferred (CDK acceptable), with strong opinions on module strategy, state management, and guardrail enforcement across many accounts and environments
• Expert command of CI/CD for infrastructure: pipeline design, drift detection, plan/apply workflows, and self-service patterns that serve engineering teams safely at scale
• Hands-on experience with chaos engineering and fault injection in production environments, including failure-injection tooling and game-day operations
• Strong grounding in observability for infrastructure: SLO and error-budget design, health-check strategy, dependency mapping, and state-of-the-fleet visibility
• Cross-functional leadership, comfortable as a peer with senior engineering, product, and finance leaders on availability, redundancy cost, and recovery-capability conversations
• Comfortable with the coordination work of a recently combined company: divergent AWS estates, in-flight unification, and the political work that comes with consolidation

Preferred qualifications

• Hands-on experience with AWS resiliency tooling such as Resilience Hub, Route 53 Application Recovery Controller, Elastic Disaster Recovery, or Fault Injection Service
• AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification, or equivalent demonstrable depth
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure orchestration tooling beyond raw Terraform (Terragrunt, Atlantis, Spacelift, env0, Crossplane, or similar)
• Background in SRE or platform reliability with strong instincts for SLO design, error budget policy, and toil reduction
• Experience modeling the cost of redundancy (standby capacity, cross-region data transfer, replication overhead) and defending those tradeoffs to business stakeholders
• Experience post-M&A integrating infrastructure and resiliency practices across two or more legacy AWS estates
• Experience in regulated industries, or other domains with mission-critical workloads and strict continuity requirement

  About Jeppesen ForeFlight:

  Jeppesen ForeFlight is a leading provider of innovative aviation software solutions, serving the Commercial, Business, Military, and General Aviation sectors globally. Combining Jeppesen’s 90-year legacy of accurate aeronautical data with ForeFlight’s expertise in cutting-edge aviation technology, the company delivers an integrated suite of tools designed to enhance safety, improve operational efficiency, and sharpen decision-making.

  Why You Should Join (USA):

  At Jeppesen ForeFlight, we know you want a rewarding career. To do that, you need challenging projects, a good work environment, and awesome coworkers. We believe in our employees, and we empower them to make a direct impact on our products and services messaging. We strive to provide our team and their loved ones with a world-class benefits experience, focused on supporting their physical, financial, and emotional wellbeing. Our benefits package includes but not limited to the following:

  • Medical, dental, vision insurance with Employer paid health premiums
  • Open PTO Policy
  • 401(k) with up to 10% company matching and immediate vesting
  • 12 Weeks Paid Parent Leave
  • Flight Training Rewards

  Pay is based upon candidate experience and qualifications, as well market and business considerations: Summary Pay Range: $208,000.00 to $244,000.00

  Jeppesen ForeFlight - EOE including Disability/Vets | Pay Transparency | E-Verify Participant