Principal Software Development Engineer

We need your talent!  Waters Corporation is currently seeking a DevOps Principal Engineer to join our Global Software Engineering team. 

Our team understands the value of their work in the real world. As a DevOps Principal Engineer in Milford, MA you'll be working with technology used for quality testing and the development of nearly every drug taken in around the globe.  These are processes that we want to optimize.  Consider this, today’s lab instruments can only be viewed from the lab – our mission here is to be able to enable scientists to see their lab results from Starbucks, home, anywhere you can access the internet. 

We are just getting started with building our next generation best in class platform with a goal of being the “best in the industry” to support our customers across life, materials, food, and environmental sciences. 

We are looking for a passionate Principal DevOps Engineer to lead our CI/CD platform initiatives in a hybrid cloud and physical instrument environment. This role combines hands-on technical expertise with strategic leadership to drive horizontal alignment across multiple development value streams and establish enterprise-scale automation practices.
This role is onsite 3x/week in Milford, MA: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

Our organization is built on the principles of strong collaboration, cross-functional teamwork, and a relentless drive to solve problems that matter. If this is the type of culture you excel in, then we look forward to speaking with you.

Internal Platform Development & Architecture

• Design, develop, and evolve internal build platforms (primarily in Python) serving 65+ active software projects.
• Build and scale platform services that reliably handle 10,000+ jobs, with clear SLIs/SLOs, observability, and failure modes teams can understand.
• Own platform APIs, CLIs, and self-service workflows so teams can onboard, build, test, and release without tickets.
• Treat internal developers as customers: gather feedback, prioritize pain points, and iterate on developer experience.

CI/CD Excellence & Process Optimization

• Implement and improve pipeline primitives, reusable templates, and release automation that raise quality and cadence across teams.
• Reduce manual toil by encoding policy and workflow into the platform—creating guardrails as code and eliminating tribal knowledge.
• Support horizontal integration across diverse value streams via shared contracts, plugins, and extension points.

Infrastructure & Technical Leadership

• Solve hybrid-cloud and on-premises constraints through durable platform abstractions, and eliminate ticket-driven firefighting.
• Support physical instrument and hardware-constrained workflows with purpose-built platform capabilities where needed.
• Stay hands-on designing and shipping production-quality code; use ops experience to inform architecture.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Serve as a technical leader and mentor, elevating the capabilities of engineers across the organization.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration, ensuring smooth integration across systems, teams, and business functions.
• Establish and champion best practices, standards, and patterns for DevOps and platform engineering.
• Communicate technical strategies and trade-offs clearly with engineers, leadership, and stakeholders at all levels.

Abilities that will help you be successful: 

• Education & Experience: Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science (or a related field) with 10+ years of DevOps/platform engineering experience, including operating at scale.
• Programming Expertise: Strong proficiency in Python, with a deep understanding of object-oriented design and maintainable software architecture.
• Git at Scale: Expert Git; multi-repo/monorepo strategies; branching and governance that platforms enforce.
• Systems Proficiency: Advanced shell scripting (Bash, PowerShell) with fluency in diverse Linux and Windows operating environments.
• CI/CD Leadership: Extensive experience designing, implementing, and scaling CI/CD pipelines; proven success driving release reliability and velocity across multiple teams.
• Scale & Reliability: Track record managing large-scale systems with high availability and performance requirements.
• Hybrid Cloud Expertise: Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments.
• Automation: Bias toward eliminating manual workflows with durable, tested automation.
• Technical Leadership: Proven ability to mentor engineers, influence architectural direction, and set standards across teams.
• Hands-On Development: Strong programming background with the ability to design and deliver production-quality code and raise the bar for platform quality.

Preferred Qualifications

• Complex System Integration: Experience supporting or integrating with physical instruments or hardware-constrained systems.
• Proven Leadership: Demonstrated technical leadership experience within software organizations, influencing direction and elevating team performance.
• Polyglot Engineering: Knowledge of multiple programming languages and build systems, with the ability to choose the right tool for the problem.
• Scale Experience: Hands-on experience scaling platforms to reliably manage very high volumes and concurrency.
• Enterprise Context: Background operating within enterprise software development environments, balancing agility with governance.
• Configuration Management Expertise: Experience with modern configuration management frameworks such as Ansible, Puppet, or Chef.
• Cloud-Native Practices: Champion of containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker, Lambda, and ECS.
• Advanced Python Expertise: Experience developing large-scale, maintainable Python services and frameworks used across the organization.

Waters Corporation (NYSE:WAT) is a global leader in life sciences and diagnostics, dedicated to accelerating the benefits of pioneering science through analytical technologies, informatics, and service. With a focus on regulated, high-volume testing environments, our innovative portfolio harnesses deep scientific expertise across chemistry, physics, and biology. We collaborate with customers around the world to advance the release of effective, high-quality medicines, ensure the safety of food and water, and drive better patient outcomes by detecting diseases earlier, managing routine infections, and combating antibiotic resistance. Through a shared culture of relentless innovation, our passionate team of ~16,000 colleagues turn scientific challenges into breakthroughs that improve lives worldwide. 

Diversity and inclusion are fundamental to our core values at Waters Corporation. It benefits our employees, our products, our customers and our community. Waters complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws. Qualified applicants are considered without regard to sex, race, color, ancestry, national origin, citizenship status, religion, age, marital status (including civil unions), military service, veteran status, pregnancy (including childbirth and related medical conditions), genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, legally recognized disability, domestic violence victim status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Waters is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All hiring decisions are based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time.