Principal Programmer Analyst

Saved job description

Requisition ID:   97566  

Florida Power & Light Company is the largest electric utility in the U.S., providing reliable energy to nearly 12 million Floridians. With one of the nation’s most fuel-efficient, cost-effective power generation fleets and industry-leading reliability, we’re redefining what’s possible in energy. Want to be part of something powerful? Join our outstanding team and help shape the future of energy.

Position Specific Description

Position Summary

NextEra Energy Resources is seeking a Principal IIoT Platform Engineer to provide technical leadership for the Industrial IoT infrastructure supporting one of the industry's largest renewable energy telemetry platforms. The platform ingests telemetry from hundreds of wind, solar, battery storage, and distributed generation facilities, processing more than 100 billion Industrial IoT events per day while delivering highly available data services for operational technology (OT), enterprise analytics, AI, and business applications.

This role serves as a senior technical leader for the Industrial IoT platform, responsible for the design, operation, and continual improvement of the Ignition, HiveMQ, and AWS infrastructure that powers the Sequoia platform. The Principal Engineer will provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, establish engineering standards, lead architecture decisions within their domain, and solve complex platform challenges while partnering with other Principal Engineers across the Sequoia ecosystem to deliver a secure, resilient, and scalable Industrial IoT platform.

Primary Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

Serve as a senior technical leader for the Industrial IoT platform.

Lead architecture decisions for the Ignition, HiveMQ, and AWS technology stack.

Mentor engineers across multiple teams while fostering technical excellence.

Establish engineering standards, operational best practices, and platform governance.

Review solution designs to ensure scalability, resiliency, security, and maintainability.

Lead technical root cause analysis for critical production incidents.

Champion automation-first engineering practices.

Develop platform standards, documentation, and operational procedures.

Partner with Enterprise Architecture, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Operations, Data Engineering, and Application Development teams.

Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend improvements to the Industrial IoT platform.

Ignition Platform Engineering

Serve as the organization's subject matter expert for enterprise Ignition infrastructure, including:

Enterprise Ignition architecture and platform design

New server deployments and platform expansion

Gateway installation, configuration, and lifecycle management

Gateway upgrades and migration planning

High Availability (HA) and redundancy configuration

Gateway Network architecture

Enterprise Administration Module (EAM)

Enterprise gateway management

Gateway backup and disaster recovery

Performance tuning and optimization

Certificate management

Security Zones and Identity Providers

Tag Provider architecture

Historian integration

Module administration

Capacity planning

Troubleshooting complex production gateway issues

Standardization of enterprise Ignition deployments

Operational support for large-scale production environments

HiveMQ Platform Engineering

Design, implement, and support highly available enterprise MQTT infrastructure, including:

Multi-node HiveMQ cluster architecture

High Availability (HA) and fault-tolerant deployments

Cluster replication and synchronization

Broker performance tuning

Client load balancing

MQTT persistence

Store-and-forward strategies

Authentication and authorization

TLS configuration and certificate management

Broker monitoring and health management

Capacity planning

Disaster recovery planning

MQTT delivery troubleshooting

Sparkplug B implementation and optimization

AWS Platform Engineering

Design, deploy, automate, and support cloud-native infrastructure utilizing:

Amazon ECS

Amazon EC2

AWS Lambda

Amazon SQS

Amazon SNS

Amazon EventBridge

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon CloudWatch

AWS CloudTrail

AWS IAM

AWS Systems Manager

AWS Secrets Manager

Elastic Load Balancers (ALB/NLB)

Auto Scaling Groups

Amazon Route 53

Amazon VPC

Security Groups

Network ACLs

Transit Gateway

AWS PrivateLink

AWS Backup

AWS KMS

Amazon S3

Amazon ECR

AWS Step Functions

Implement and maintain infrastructure using Terraform and/or AWS CloudFormation , ensuring all infrastructure is automated, repeatable, version-controlled, and aligned with enterprise standards.

Platform Reliability & Operations

Design highly available and fault-tolerant architectures.

Eliminate single points of failure.

Improve platform resiliency and operational maturity.

Perform infrastructure capacity planning.

Lead production incident response.

Develop disaster recovery strategies.

Create operational runbooks and engineering standards.

Improve platform monitoring and observability.

Optimize performance across distributed systems.

Support 24x7 mission-critical production operations.

Industrial IoT Technologies

Deep expertise with:

Ignition

HiveMQ

MQTT

Sparkplug B

OPC UA

Monitoring & Observability

Experience with enterprise monitoring platforms including:

Amazon CloudWatch

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK / OpenSearch

Enterprise logging

Metrics collection

Alerting strategies

Capacity dashboards

Operational health monitoring

Automation & Infrastructure as Code

Develop and maintain automation using:

Terraform

AWS CloudFormation

Python

PowerShell

Bash

Git

CI/CD pipelines

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Service Management

Experience supporting enterprise operational processes utilizing:

ServiceNow

Incident Management

Change Management

CMDB

Asset Management

Operational workflows

ITIL processes

Security

Working knowledge of:

Zero Trust principles

AWS IAM best practices

Certificate lifecycle management

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

TLS

Cybersecurity hardening

Secrets management

Least privilege access

Industrial cybersecurity

Required Experience

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.

10+ years designing, implementing, and supporting enterprise infrastructure.

7+ years administering enterprise Ignition environments.

7+ years supporting AWS production environments.

5+ years designing and operating enterprise MQTT platforms.

Experience implementing Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and/or AWS CloudFormation.

Experience supporting enterprise ServiceNow processes and integrations.

Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems.

Experience supporting 24x7 production environments.

Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and leading technical teams.

Experience supporting large-scale Industrial IoT or telemetry platforms.

Experience supporting platforms processing 100+ billion Industrial IoT events per day or equivalent hyperscale distributed systems.

Preferred Experience

Renewable Energy

Electric Utility Operations

Power Generation

Industrial Automation

Manufacturing

Enterprise Cloud Platform Engineering

Preferred Certifications

AWS Solutions Architect – Professional

AWS SysOps Administrator – Associate

AWS Developer – Associate

AWS Advanced Networking – Specialty

Technical Skills

Industrial Platforms

Ignition

HiveMQ

MQTT

Sparkplug B

OPC UA

AWS Technologies

ECS

EC2

Lambda

SQS

SNS

EventBridge

API Gateway

CloudWatch

IAM

Systems Manager

Secrets Manager

Route 53

S3

ECR

Step Functions

Infrastructure

Terraform

AWS CloudFormation

Linux

Windows Server

Docker

Git

Programming & Scripting

Python

PowerShell

Bash

SQL

Leadership Competencies

The Principal IIoT Platform Engineer is expected to be a technical leader who elevates the capabilities of the entire engineering organization.

The successful candidate will:

Mentor engineers across multiple teams and disciplines.

Establish engineering standards and best practices.

Lead architecture reviews and technical design sessions.

Coach engineers on troubleshooting complex distributed systems.

Drive operational excellence through automation and standardization.

Influence technology strategy across multiple engineering teams.

Build consensus among infrastructure, cybersecurity, application, OT, and operational teams.

Serve as a senior technical escalation point for the organization's most complex technical issues.

Foster knowledge sharing and technical growth throughout the engineering organization.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role is measured by the reliability, scalability, security, and operational maturity of the Industrial IoT platform. The Principal Engineer will help ensure the platform continues to evolve through automation, engineering standards, resilient architecture, and technical mentorship while supporting one of the largest Industrial IoT environments in the utility industry. This individual will play a key role in enabling a platform that reliably processes more than 100 billion Industrial IoT events per day while supporting the continued growth of renewable energy operations and the broader Sequoia ecosystem.

Job Overview

Employees in this position ensure that solutions developed on domain expert platforms conform to application strategy and ensure high availability on multimillion dollar, complex, mission critical and high volume transactional systems for the business unit. This position includes, but is not limited to, writing, coding, testing, analyzing, configuring, debugging and documenting software programs and applications.

Job Duties & Responsibilities

Researches, designs, documents, and modifies software specifications throughout the production life cycle

Applies Six Sigma methodologies within software applications to help the business unit improve reliability, drive efficiencies and reduce costs

Manages the development of new or existing programs and applications into the technical infrastructure and integration into existing business processes

Provides technical or functional guidance/leadership and collaborates with work teams, onshore/offshore vendors and business unit personnel as needed

Collaborates with network administrators, systems analysts, database administrators, external vendor support, and software engineers to assist in resolving problems with software products or company software systems

Provides guidance on relevant system administration tasks including backup/recovery of systems and disaster recovery

Designs, runs and monitors software performance tests on new and existing programs for the purposes of correcting errors, isolating areas for improvement, and general debugging

Conducts research on emerging application development software products, languages, and standards in support of procurement, development and maintenance efforts

Develops and implements standard build processes and common utilities and tools that are repeatable

Meets attendance and storm duty requirements and has the ability to work extended hours

Performs other job-related duties as assigned

Required Qualifications

High School Grad / GED

Bachelor’s or Equivalent Experience

Experience: 6+ years

Preferred Qualifications

Master’s Degree

Six Sigma Master Black Belt

Six Sigma Black Belt

Six Sigma Green Belt

Six Sigma Yellow Belt

NextEra Energy offers a wide range of benefits to support our employees and their eligible family members. Click here to learn more.

Employee Group:  Exempt

Employee Type:   Full Time

Job Category:  Information Technology

Organization:  Florida Power & Light Company 

Relocation Provided:  Yes, if applicable

NextEra Energy is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to race, color, age, national origin, religion, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetics, disability, protected veteran status or any other basis prohibited by law. 

NextEra Energy provides reasonable accommodation in its application and selection process for qualified individuals, including accommodations related to compliance with conditional job offer requirements, consistent with federal, state, and local laws. Supporting medical or religious documentation will be required where applicable and permitted by applicable law. To request a reasonable accommodation, please send an e-mail to recruiting-coordinator.sharedmailbox@nexteraenergy.com , providing your name, telephone number and the best time for us to reach you. 

NextEra Energy will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor’s legal duty to furnish information.

NextEra Energy does not accept any unsolicited resumes or referrals from any third-party recruiting firms or agencies . Please see our policy for more information.