Staff Cloud Engineer

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

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: $161,000.00 - $249,500.00

Job Description

At Western Governors University, technology is a critical enabler of our mission to expand access to high-quality education. As a Staff Cloud Engineer, you will serve as one of the university's most senior technical contributors, driving the architecture, automation, and evolution of our AWS cloud platform.

This role is designed for an experienced cloud engineering leader who thrives on solving complex technical challenges, defining engineering standards, mentoring engineers, and building highly scalable, secure, and resilient cloud infrastructure. You'll influence cloud strategy across the organization while partnering with software engineering, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, platform engineering, and operations teams.

This is a hands-on technical leadership position—not a people management role.

 

What You'll Do

As a Staff Cloud Engineer, you will:

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of enterprise-scale AWS cloud platforms supporting mission-critical university systems.

• Define long-term cloud infrastructure roadmaps that improve scalability, reliability, security, operational excellence, and cost optimization.

• Architect Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions using Terraform and modern cloud automation practices.

• Design highly available, fault-tolerant, multi-account AWS environments following AWS Well-Architected Framework principles.

• Build and maintain enterprise CI/CD platforms that enable secure, repeatable, and automated software delivery.

• Develop automation that eliminates manual operational work and improves platform reliability.

• Design and implement observability strategies including centralized logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.

• Partner with application engineering teams to build cloud-native architectures and accelerate DevOps adoption.

• Architect container and serverless platforms using Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) and AWS serverless technologies.

• Collaborate with cybersecurity teams to implement secure-by-design cloud architectures, identity management, governance, and compliance controls.

• Lead performance optimization, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and resiliency initiatives.

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues across distributed systems and cloud services.

• Establish cloud engineering standards, best practices, and architectural patterns across the organization.

• Mentor Senior and Cloud Engineers through technical leadership, architecture reviews, and coaching.

• Serve as a technical advisor for cloud modernization and digital transformation initiatives.

• Evaluate emerging cloud technologies and recommend adoption where appropriate.

Required Qualifications

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

• 10+ years of progressive experience designing, building, and supporting enterprise infrastructure, cloud platforms, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering environments.

• 5+ years of hands-on AWS engineering experience supporting large-scale production environments.

• Deep expertise designing and operating highly available cloud infrastructu