Principal Cloud Architect - Craft Education

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Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:
 

Grade: Technical 411

Pay Range: $157,000.00 - $243,400.00

Job Description

The Principal Cloud Architect is a position of technical expertise, influence, and leadership in the realm of technology. The position will be required to apply their expert knowledge to ensure best practices and well-engineered architecture across the department. They will also be a key stakeholder and initiator of major changes to processes, engineering practices, and system administration. This position will be required to work in a space of solving critical issues and initiatives across all of Craft Education. It will require an extensive and deep understanding of cutting-edge practices and innovative approaches to problems. Principal Cloud Architects are also tasked with establishing and maintaining a positive and productive culture based on the WGU Leadership Principles.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Utilizes AI (LLMs, Agentic, MCP, etc) to gain efficiency in execution of infrastructure modification for greater rates of delivery.
• Big picture thinker that can not only design but more importantly implement.
• Strategically approaching issues, understanding different business and technical requirements and challenges with implementations.
• Participate in architectural reviews from a governance perspective and provide analysis feedback
• Plan and manage hardware platform design such as identifying components, standardized infrastructure components, serviceability and creating system solutions and frameworks.
• Performing analysis of systems to identify problem areas, identify ways of enhancing existing systems, and develop viable solutions.
• Develop, mentor, monitor progress towards goals and train Engineers on DevOps and CI/CD methodologies and tools for automated infrastructure code test, integration, deployment, and assurance.
• Provide technical support to product teams for various activities such as testing, validation, sustaining, value engineering, and DevOps required for the products we support.
• Ensure our systems are built on HA Architecture and provide native Backup/DR support within our defined RTO/RPO requirements.
• Performs other related duties as assigned.

Knowledge, Skill and Abilities:

• Ability to travel to client locations when needed.
• Expertise implementing AWS services in a variety of distributed computing environments.
• Experience with highly available and fault-tolerant enterprise and web-scale software deployments desired
• Expertise in Infrastructure automation through IaC scripting (E.g. Terraform, shell, Powershell)
• Strong practical Linux and Windows-based systems administration skills in a Cloud (AWS, Azure, Google) or Virtualized environment.
• Experience leading cloud operations, including data assurance, monitoring, alerting and notifications.

Competencies: 

Organizational Impact:

• Works proactively to anticipate and prevents highly complex problems crossing disciplines.
• Develops and establishes technical processes.
• Will provide solutions for extremely specialized, complex technical issues.
• Fully understands and quantifies program risks with broad, significant impact.

Problem Solving & Decision Making:

• Develops and accomplishes goals and objectives independently.
• This individual builds, leads, and integ