Principal DevOps Engineer at NBCUniversal - Remote US — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
Remote Status: This role is designated fully remote within the United States — employees work from their own residence. While this is a strong foundation for location flexibility, the role is explicitly US-based, which limits international nomadic travel unless you hold dual citizenship or have established foreign residency.
Timezone & Schedule: Live broadcast production environments have real-time operational demands. Although the posting doesn't mandate specific hours, the on-call nature of a Principal-level infrastructure engineer supporting live NBC broadcasts strongly implies availability during US business hours (likely ET/PT overlap windows). This makes the role partially async-unfriendly — extended stays in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe may create friction during incident response or live events.
Visa Considerations: Since employment is US-based, international nomads would need a US work visa (H-1B, O-1, or TN for Canadians/Mexicans). Existing US residents can travel abroad on tourist/digital nomad visas while remaining employed, subject to local tax and labor laws.
Salary vs. Nomad Cost of Living:
- Lisbon, Portugal: ~$2,500–$3,500/mo comfortable living. At $180K–$230K USD annually, your purchasing power is exceptional.
- Bangkok, Thailand: ~$1,500–$2,500/mo. A $200K salary would provide extreme financial leverage here.
- Medellín, Colombia: ~$1,200–$2,000/mo. Again, excellent leverage — though US payroll taxes still apply regardless of where you live.
No explicit coworking stipend or equipment budget is mentioned, but NBCUniversal's benefits page may include such perks. The compensation is strong enough to self-fund a premium nomad setup.
Company Description
NBCUniversal is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies. We create world-class content, which we distribute across our portfolio of film, television, and streaming, and bring to life through our global theme park destinations, consumer products, and experiences. We own and operate leading entertainment and news brands, including NBC, NBC News, NBC Sports, Telemundo, NBC Local Stations, Bravo, and Peacock, our premium ad-supported streaming service.
We produce and distribute premier filmed entertainment and programming through Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, Focus Features, and the four global television studios under the Universal Studio Group banner. We also operate industry-leading theme parks including Universal Orlando Resort and Universal Studios Hollywood. NBCUniversal is a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation. Visit www.nbcuniversal.com for more information.
Our impact is rooted in improving the communities where our employees, customers, and audiences live and work. We champion an inclusive culture and strive to attract and develop a talented workforce to create and deliver a wide range of content reflecting our world.
Job Description
We are looking for a Principal DevOps Engineer to architect and evolve the platform that powers NBC's broadcast production environments. As a senior technical leader on the NBC Production Application Engineering team, you will design a Kubernetes-native platform that automates the provisioning, lifecycle management, and delivery of cloud infrastructure at enterprise scale.
Our team leverages infrastructure-as-code, custom Kubernetes controllers, and GitOps workflows to orchestrate resources across complex multi-account and hybrid cloud environments. Built to support the demands of live broadcast production, this platform spans compute provisioning, dynamic software-defined networking, hybrid DNS models, remote Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and robust configuration management via Puppet. We are never shy about contributing upstream to the open-source projects we rely on.
In this role, you will drive the technical vision of the platform — writing production Go services, architecting cloud-native solutions, and establishing the engineering standards our teams rely on. This role requires deep fluency across Kubernetes internals, cloud infrastructure, Go systems programming, and a passion for mentoring engineers.
Primary Responsibilities
- Platform Architecture & Vision: Architect a Kubernetes-native platform that models broadcast infrastructure as custom resources. Lead the technical strategy leveraging Crossplane compositions and custom Go functions to automate provisioning across multi-account AWS environments and on-prem control rooms.
- Systems Engineering & Integrations: Design, build, and maintain production-grade Kubernetes operators, controllers, and internal platform APIs in Go. Develop custom Crossplane providers to deeply integrate external enterprise platforms (such as NRCS, Venafi, and Infoblox) into our control plane.
- Infrastructure & Networking Delivery: Lead the design of cloud networking, DNS strategies, and cross-account connectivity across hybrid environments, automating VPC topology and dynamic network routing.
- Cross-Discipline Collaboration: Partner with broadcast systems engineers, system integrators, and external vendors to bridge the gap between broadcast hardware and automated infrastructure. Lead efforts to "Puppet-ize" bare-metal compute configurations and integrate proprietary vendor solutions into our configuration-as-code ecosystem.
- Technical Leadership: Serve as a technical authority for the team. Write RFCs, drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and establish high-confidence CI/CD pipelines, testing strategies, and GitHub Actions automation.
- Access & Security Strategy: Own the platform's authorization model, designing hierarchical RBAC systems, resource identifier schemes, and identity integrations that enforce fine-grained access control.
- Operational Excellence: Drive GitOps-based continuous delivery (Flux, Kustomize, Helm) and manage configuration-as-code for compute fleets using Puppet. Design comprehensive observability and alerting stacks.
- VDI Integration: Oversee the integration of remote desktop/VDI connectivity solutions, focusing on session authentication, credential management, and gateway routing.
Qualifications
- Experience: 10+ years designing, building, and operating production infrastructure and cloud-native platforms at enterprise scale.
- Software Engineering: Strong proficiency in Go (systems-level programming, API servers) and deep experience building Kubernetes controllers/operators using controller-runtime and kubebuilder patterns.
- Kubernetes Internals: Expert-level knowledge including CRD/XRD generation, operators, informers, admission webhooks, and RBAC.
- Crossplane & Control Planes: Deep production experience with Crossplane, including composite resources, composition functions, and developing custom Crossplane providers in Go.
- AWS & Networking: Extensive production experience with AWS multi-account architectures, cross-account networking, and identity federation — including EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM, STS, SSM, Secrets Manager, Route 53, and S3.
- GitOps Delivery: Production experience with Flux (HelmRelease, Kustomization) or ArgoCD for continuous delivery on Kubernetes.
- Configuration Management: Hands-on experience with Puppet, including module development, PuppetDB, Hiera, and r10k.
- APIs & Security: Experience designing REST APIs with middleware patterns and modern authentication (OAuth/JWT), cross-account IAM trust chains, and secrets abstraction.
- Observability: Strong background in telemetry platforms using Grafana, Prometheus/Mimir, Loki, OpenTelemetry, and metrics collection agents (Alloy, Prometheus Node Exporter).
- Databases: Working knowledge of PostgreSQL, SQLite, or similar relational databases — schema design, migrations, and query optimization.
- Communication: Proven ability to present architectural decisions to executives, engage with vendors, and write clear technical documentation.
Preferred Qualifications
- Familiarity with broadcast/media production workflows and the operational constraints of live production environments.
- Experience with the Crossplane function SDK for building custom composition functions in Go, and Kubernetes disaster recovery (Velero cluster restoration, backups).
- Familiarity with VDI solutions (NICE DCV, Leostream, PCoIP, etc.), machine identity workflows, and PKI certificate management (Venafi or similar).
- Experience with hybrid DNS architectures (Infoblox), software-defined networking (VPC peering, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, CloudWan), and Envoy Gateway / Gateway API.
- Familiarity with advanced testing frameworks (k6, KUTTL), SOPS for encrypted GitOps configurations, and local development workflows (Air, kind/colima).
- Ability to script routine tasks in Bash and PowerShell.
- Active contributions to open-source projects, particularly within the CNCF / Kubernetes ecosystem.
Remote Work
Fully Remote: This position has been designated as fully remote, meaning the position is expected to contribute from a non-NBCUniversal worksite, most commonly an employee's residence.
Compensation & Benefits
- This position is eligible for company-sponsored benefits, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k), paid leave, tuition reimbursement, and a variety of other discounts and perks. Learn more by visiting the Benefits page of the Careers website.
- Salary range: $180,000 – $230,000 (bonus eligible)
Additional Information
As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with an NBCUniversal employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision.
NBCUniversal's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.
If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran, you have the right to request a reasonable accommodation. You can request reasonable accommodations by emailing [email protected].
For LA County and City Residents Only: NBCUniversal will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories, or arrest or conviction records, in a manner consistent with relevant legal requirements, including the City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative For Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, where applicable.
Frequently Asked Questions
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