Cloud Engineer

Grand Canyon Education is currently seeking a Cloud Engineer to join our team. The ideal candidate for this position is a person who is versatile, creative and will know how to think "outside-the-box." The position will share responsibilities for supporting, managing, provisioning, and configuration of Cloud based resources.

This person will pursue automation, innovation, and excellence in support; with a goal to deliver 24x7x365 high-availability for university education services. The Cloud Engineer will be joining a team that is part of a dynamic DevOps culture that is making a difference.

This role is broad and will not be limited to a single technology platform but will also include working closely with application developers to handle rapid platform deployments and releases. Other responsibilities will include supporting on premise operating systems, hybrid software systems, and related services while following and adhering to industry best practices and compliance in support of our business objectives and student experience.

Responsibilities:

• Thinks outside the box and approaches infrastructure with modern techniques that are agile and scalable.
• Soft skills that include coordinating meetings and communicating with non-technical staff on project requests.
• Finds opportunities for streamlining processes using code and technology to improve time-to-market of services.
• Leads focused activities to migrate to higher availability and efficiency for business-critical environments.
• Assists with architecting and engineering of solutions for various project and operational needs.
• Will assist with developing and streamlining automated infrastructure using tools such as Terraform, SCCM, Ansible, Puppet, Chef or other infrastructure as code products.
• Assists with configuration and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines and custom code deployments on-premises and in the cloud.
• Assists with development, deployment and maintenance of container hosts and container dependent applications.
• Assists with design, implementation and automation of cloud based resources, infrastructure and applications.
• Serves as an escalation point for investigation and troubleshooting issues in production, QA and DEV environments.
• Assists with the repair and recovery from outages and incidents.
• Adheres with standards for operational, configuration, or other procedures.
• Adheres to periodic performance reporting to support capacity planning.
• Monitors and performs ongoing performance tuning, hardware upgrades, and resource optimizations as required.
• Finds ways to automate and report metrics and analytics.
• Provides after hours on-call support.

Qualifications:

• Ability to be detail oriented and to think independently; exhibit a high level of initiative and self-confidence along with strong verbal and written communication skills; and demonstrate excellent time management skills.
• Moderate to high understanding of systems architecture from the application through the instance/server stack.
• Proven experience in creating successful designs and the implementation of high availability systems, applications, and services in the cloud.
• An openness to see problems or issues from various angles and a willingness to discuss and meeting with other teams to vet solutions until a common goal or solution is agreed upon.
• Agile and able to adapt and adjust as required until the business needs are met.
• Ability to research and articulate recommended solutions and technology; design, develop and document technical solutions; document procedures and change management documentation; experience managing multiple priorities simultaneously.
• Ability create and to interpret complex technical drawings and information.
• Personable and effective in all forms of communication.

Education and/or Experience:

• 3 - 5 years of experience operating production applications in one or more public clouds
• 5 - 10 years of blended experience supporting Linux, Windows, virtualization, storage, networking, backups and DR;
• In-depth technical knowledge of current infrastructure protocols, business platforms, middleware, internet standards, and database software.
• Moderate to high level scripting experience using PowerShell, Python, Bash or other coding languages.
• Working knowledge of source control systems such as GIT or TFS.
• Familiar with build/deployment automation tools like Azure DevOps, Jenkins, Bamboo, etc.
• Working knowledge of containers and container management products/methodologies such as Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, etc.
• Proven experience operating Open Source software in production.
• Strong technical understanding of enterprise computing solutions including: Architectural design and oversight.
• AWS and Azure Cloud certificate(s) a plus.
• Excellent planning, coordination, and communications skills as well as the ability to think independently or as a team.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelors degree in a related discipline (computer science, information technology, etc.) from a regionally accredited institution with a technical major, such as engineering or computer science or equivalent work experience.
• Industry certifications a plus.