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 Staff Cloud Engineer should be agnostic to tools and should be able to supervise, design, architect and code using Apache Spark and other cloud technologies.  The production and acts as a liaison between the software development teams and other infrastructure engineers. They work closely with development teams and architects to ensure a reliable, efficient, and stable infrastructure to house our software technologies that serve our student and employee populations.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Supervise work on cloud technologies and architect scalable.
• Supervise the architecture and design of complete model solutions.
• Lead and perform research and analysis to find solutions for complex business problems.
• Monitor job performance and fine tune Spark SQL queries as appropriate on a regular basis.
• Deploy automation of software deployment and automation tools.
• Increase application and system responsiveness.
• Monitor performance by anticipating and correcting operational issues before occurrence.
• Create more stable operating environments by continuously improving infrastructure to be easily deployable and scalable
• Positively impact projects by completing tasks assigned on time.
• Communicate technical and domain knowledge as it relates to work, to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Help continually improve ongoing reporting and analysis processes, automate, or simplify self-service modelling and production support for customers.
• 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 DevOps scripting (E.g. shell, Python, Node, Ruby, Powershell)
• Strong practical Linux and Windows-based systems administration skills in a Cloud (AWS, Azure, Google) or Virtualized environment.
• Experience leading cloud operations, including assurance, monitoring, alerting and notifications. Experience scripting/programming in Bash, Java and Node.js
• Understanding of DevOps, Scrum, and ITIL concepts
• Understanding of Virtualization and/or Containerization
• Understanding of GitFlow model and Continuous Integration with Travis or Jenkins
• Experience using Configuration Management Tools like such as Chef and SaltStack
• Experience using monitoring tools like New Relic, Nagios, CloudWatch, or IPMon
• Strong communication and documentation skills
• Self-starter with a drive to work autonomously as a member of a collaborative team.
• Strong service-oriented focus with a customer service attitude
• Strong analytical ski

Competencies: 

Organizational or Student Impact:

• Recommends and implements changes in technical/business processes; identifies areas for improvement.
• Helps lead/coordinate extremely complex technical projects and programs and leads development and implementation of innovative solutions for specialized technical issues.
• Works proactively; identifies and helps prevent/ solve problems that may cross disciplines.
• Fully understands and quantifies project risks with impact. Identifies, generates, and implements innovative solutions.

Problem Solving & Decision Making:

• This individual accomplishes goals and objectives independently.
• Builds and leads teams, influencing decisions and results.
• Uses discretion to fully scope, design, and implement solutions to complex technical problems.
• The individual provides regular technical advice and direction to technical teams and management.
• Models and helps set high standards for effective interactions with internal and external individuals.

Communication &