Principal Cloud Architect

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.

Current WGU employees should submit an internal application before 10/16/2024 to be considered.

Position Overview

The Principal Cloud Architect is a position of technical expertise, influence, and leadership in the technology realm. 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 Ed Tech. 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:

• Big picture thinker that can not only design but more importantly implement.
• Strategically approaching customer issues, understanding different business requirements and challenges with implementations.
• Participate in new systems architectural reviews from a governance perspective and provide analysis feedback in post deployment critiques.
• Plan and manage hardware platform design such as identifying components, standardized infrastructure components, serviceability and creating system solutions and frameworks.
• Perform analysis of systems and identify problem areas, identify ways of enhancing existing systems, and develop viable solutions.
• Develop and train Engineers on DevOps and CI/CD methodologies and tools for automated infrastructure code test, integration, deployment, and assurance.
• Provide technical support to the educational segment product teams for various activities such as with testing, validation, sustaining, value engineering, and DevOps required for the product we support.
• Publish white papers, how-to articles, training materials and present at our internal summits annually.
• Ensure our systems are built on HA Architecture and provide native Backup/DR support within our defined RTO/RPO requirements.
• Mentor one or more Associate level Engineers within our Platform Services group and motivate them to come up with innovative solutions to the University’s architecture obstacles.
• Perform 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 data assurance, monitoring, alerting and notifications.

Competencies:

Organizational or Student Impact:

• Works proactively; anticipates and prevents highly complex problems crossing disciplines.
• Develops and establishes technical/business processes.
• Will provide highly innovative 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 integrates multiple project teams and broad assignments, driving decisions and results.
• Provides strategy and guidance to develop technical talent.
• Sets and models high standards for effective interactions across groups.

Communication & Influence:

• This individual communicates with experts within and outside the organization related to significant advancements specific to technology.
• Works to influence others to accept and understand technical direction, new concepts, practices, and approaches. Requires ability to communicate and influence senior executive leadership regarding matters of strategic importance to the organization.
• Frequently conducts briefings to senior leaders both within and outside of the technical function.

Leadership:

• Responsible for providing guidance, coaching, and training to other employees across the University within an area of expertise.
• Typically, responsible for managing large, complex project initiatives or strategic importance solutions to the organization, involving large cross-functional teams.
• Individual may have direct reports, but generally fewer than three.

Job Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:

• BA/BS degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.
• 6+ Years of IT Production Workload Experience.
• 3+ Years of combined experience in AWS CodeBuild, CodePipeline, and/or CodeDeploy.
• 3+ Years of combined experience in the primary AWS services VPC, IAM, EC2, ELB, RDS, Route53 & S3.
• 3+ Years of experience in Configuration Management using CloudFormation, Ansible, Terraform, Chef & Puppet.
• 3+ years of extensive experience using automation tools, such as: Terraform, Ansible, and Cloud Formation.
• 3+ years of extensive experience in governance tools like: AWS Config, Inspector, Lambda.
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional or Solutions Architect Professional.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strong experience with distance education and distance learning students is preferred.
• Expertise in at least one programming language is preferred.
• Experience working directly with customers creating cloud infrastructure solutions, leading conversations with key business stakeholders reviewing pros and cons, risks, and best practices.
• Expertise in cloud spend optimizations and serverless technology such as AWS Lambda.
• Expertise leading the design, development and deployment of business software at scale or current hands on technology infrastructure, network, compute, storage, and virtualization experience.
• Expertise with the standard software development life cycle (SDLC) and Agile/iterative methodologies required.
• Expertise with the integration of cloud services with on-premise technologies from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, HP, SAP etc.
• Expertise with compliance & risk management requirements (eg. security, PCI, privacy, SOX, HIPAA etc.).
• JSON and YAML Expertise.

Compensation and Application Process:

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:

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

WGU will accept applications for this position until 12:00 AM ET, 10/20/2024.

How to apply: apply online.

Full-time Regular Positions (FT classification, standard working hours = 40)

This is a full-time, regular position that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.

The University is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status.