Lead Cloud Operations Engineer - Production Support Services

At Fannie Mae, the inspiring work we do helps make a home a possibility for millions of homeowners and renters. Every day offers compelling opportunities to impact the future of the housing industry while being part of a collaborative team thriving in an energizing environment. Here, you will grow your career and help create access to affordable housing finance.

Job Description

THE IMPACT YOU WILL MAKE
As a Lead Cloud Operations Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in enhancing the resilience, efficiency, and performance of our AWS-hosted applications. With our cloud adoption complete, the focus now shifts to optimizing our systems for scalability, observability, and cost-effectiveness. You will lead key initiatives, mentor engineers, and collaborate across teams to ensure our cloud infrastructure is robust and future ready.

Key Responsibilities

• Cloud Maturity & Optimization
  Partner across teams to elevate cloud operations maturity, focusing on improving resiliency, observability, performance, and cost-effectiveness of AWS-based systems.

• Monitoring, Incident Response & Operational Excellence
  Utilize observability platforms (e.g., CloudWatch, Splunk, Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry) to lead incident triage, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement efforts.

• Infrastructure & Network Insight
  Maintain comprehensive knowledge of application architecture, including firewalls, load balancers, DNS (Route53), WAF, and Layer 3/4 network components to ensure secure and efficient system operations.

• Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement
  Partner with engineering, architecture, and product teams to influence infrastructure roadmaps, support enterprise-wide changes, and ensure alignment with business goals.

• Resilience & Disaster Recovery
  Collaborate with cross-functional teams to lead disaster recovery planning and execution, ensuring critical systems remain highly available and resilient.

Lead Expectations

• Operational Leadership: Serve as the escalation point for critical incidents, leading resolution efforts and post-incident reviews. Ensure clear communication with stakeholders and vendors during high-impact events.

• Strategic Influence: Collaborate with engineering and application teams to shape infrastructure roadmaps and align operational goals with organizational priorities.

• Mentorship & Knowledge Sharing: Coach and support engineers through training and hands-on guidance. Foster a culture of continuous learning and shared ownership.

• Change Management: Evaluate and provide guidance on risks associated with enterprise-wide cloud changes, ensuring implementations are resilient, minimally disruptive, and aligned with compliance and governance frameworks.

• Process Improvement & Best Practices: Drive the development and adoption of operational best practices, including automation, monitoring, and incident response frameworks. Lead initiatives to improve efficiency, reduce risk, and enhance system resilience.

Required Experience

• 4 years of experience in hands-on incident management in 24x7 production environments, including on-call responsibilities.

• 4 years of experience in cloud operations with a focus on maturing cloud environments and driving operational excellence.

• Strong experience in 24x7 operational environments, including on-call rotations.

• Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives and influence technical roadmaps.

Desired Experience

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent

• AWS certification (Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator, or DevOps Engineer); Azure certification is a plus.

Technical Skills

• Advanced knowledge of AWS services (EC2, ECS, Lambda, EB, EMR, Glue, RedShift, IAM, CloudTrail, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, VPC, CloudFront, ELB, RDS, SNS/SQS, S3, EFS); working knowledge of Azure services and multi-cloud environments.

• Advanced scripting skills in Python and Bash; experience with AWS SDKs (e.g., boto3) for automation and custom tooling.

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, AWS CodePipeline, and GitHub Actions; strong understanding of release automation and deployment strategies

• Proficient in Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and CDK for infrastructure provisioning and management across multiple environments.

• Familiarity with IAM policies, KMS, Secrets Manager, and AWS Config.

• In-depth knowledge of enterprise networking concepts i