Senior Cloud Platform Engineer
Strategic Education, Inc.About the role
We are seeking a Senior Cloud Platform Engineer to help design, build, and evolve platforms that enable development teams to safely and efficiently manage their own infrastructure. Working under the direction of the Platform Engineering Manager, a successful Senior Cloud Platform Engineer (SCPE) will work to implement and refine public cloud computing infrastructure.
The SCPE will actively participate with other engineers and developers across the organization to implement new workloads in public cloud and refactor existing workloads to meet industry and business best practices. The SCPE will also work to develop systems, tools, and infrastructure that will allow teams engaging with public cloud resources faster and more consistently to promote growth and innovation.
This role focuses on infrastructure as code, automation, CI/CD, and platform tooling rather than expertise in any single cloud provider.
The ideal candidate brings strong engineering fundamentals, deep experience with Terraform and infrastructure automation, and a “shift-left” mindset—partnering with development teams early to improve reliability, security, and delivery speed.
Essential Duties & Responsibilities
Working under the direction of the Platform Engineering Manager, the Senior Cloud Platform Engineer will:
- Advanced experience using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and/or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Design, implement, and operate cloud infrastructure platforms that support application teams across multiple workloads and environments.
- Build and maintain Terraform-based infrastructure as code, emphasizing modularity, reusability, and consistency.
- Experience supporting and deploying a range of public cloud computing services, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
- deployments.
- Demonstrable skill and understanding of the concepts of Infrastructure as Code, idempotency, and repeatable tooling.
- Strong ability to troubleshoot complex issues stemming from both automation and cloud infrastructure.
- Advanced experience and understanding of high-availability, high-performance, multi-regional systems.
- Develop and manage GitLab CI pipelines used to plan, validate, and deploy infrastructure and platform components.
- Create self-service capabilities that enable development teams to provision and manage infrastructure safely with minimal manual intervention.
- Partner with application teams to shift infrastructure and operational concerns left, embedding best practices early in the development lifecycle.
- Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across automation pipelines, infrastructure code, and cloud environments.
- Participate in on-call rotation, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews to continuously improve platform reliability.
- Contribute to compliance, security, and operational reviews by designing guardrails directly into platform tooling.
- Continuously improve internal tooling, standards, and documentation to support platform adoption and developer productivity.
Required Skills & Experience
- 5+ years of experience in cloud or platform engineering roles.
- Strong hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code, with Terraform as a primary tool.
- Proven experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience building or operating internal platforms or shared infrastructure tooling used by multiple development teams.
- Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure concepts (compute, networking, storage, identity, and security), independent of provider.
- Strong troubleshooting skills across infrastructure, automation, and deployment pipelines.
- Familiarity with containerized workloads and orchestration concepts (e.g., Kubernetes), even if not a primary specialization.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with developers and translate platform capabilities into practical, usable solutions.
- Strong communication skills and a pragmatic, engineering-first approach to problem solving.
- Exposure to platform engineering concepts such as:
- Golden paths
- Opinionated templates
- Guardrails vs. gates
Education & Certifications
- Associate degree or higher, or 5 years of equivalent Cloud Engineer experience.
- Cloud or infrastructure certifications are a plus but not required.
#LI-JD1
$120,000.00 - $150,000.00 is the expected starting pay for this position. This offer is based on current budgetary guidelines and the additio
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