Cloud Engineer

Overview

The Accelerator seeks a part-time Cloud Engineer to design, build, and operate the secure cloud infrastructure that powers large-scale academic research on the information environment. Working as part of a small, high-trust cross-functional team, this individual will contribute across the full stack - from infrastructure and Dev Ops to backend services and data pipelines - and will have meaningful ownership over the technical systems that enable researchers at Princeton and across a global consortium to do their work.

This is a role for a senior, self-directing engineer who is equally comfortable designing architecture and writing code, and who takes satisfaction in building systems that are reliable, secure, and well-understood by the people who depend on them. The right candidate brings deep cloud expertise alongside strong software engineering fundamentals - someone who can own infrastructure end to end and contribute meaningfully to application development.

This position is classified at the Senior Engineer level, corresponding to 5-8 years of relevant experience.

The individual will:

• Plan and execute work independently, applying sound judgment in the evaluation, selection, and adaptation of technical approaches across infrastructure, security, and software development.
• Design and implement solutions with broad ownership - from initial architecture through deployment and ongoing operations - with supervisory input primarily at the level of objectives and critical decisions rather than day-to-day methods.
• Devise new approaches to novel problems, drawing on extensive knowledge across cloud infrastructure, Dev Sec Ops , and software engineering disciplines.
• Serve as a technical resource for the broader team, contributing to architectural decisions and engineering standards.

This is a part-time, benefits-eligible, 12-month term position. The prorated base salary range is approximately $71,723/year - $77,240/year.

A remote work arrangement within the United States may be considered for candidates with the appropriate background and experience.

Cloud Infrastructure

• Design, deploy, and maintain cloud infrastructure on Azure, with responsibility for performance, cost-effectiveness, and reliability across research and production environments.
• Architect and manage Databricks work spaces, including compute cluster configuration, access controls, and cost optimization for large-scale data processing workflows.
• Manage Azure networking, storage, identity (Azure AD / Entra ), and resource governance across multiple environments.
• Implement infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and/or Bicep; maintain version-controlled, reproducible infrastructure definitions including modules, remote state management, and PR-based workflow.
• Deploy, operate, and maintain AKS clusters running containerized workloads - including containerized data crawlers - managing deploys, scaling, health monitoring, patching, and upgrades.
• Administer Azure Blob Storage, including lifecycle policies, redundancy configuration, and access tier management.
• Manage Azure networking and security, including Private Link, network rules, RBAC, and secrets hygiene across environments.
• Own Azure cost management: budget alerts, cost/cluster policies, anomaly detection and response, and Fin Ops practices to keep infrastructure spend predictable and efficient.

Software Development & Dev Ops

• Design, build, and maintain backend services, APIs, and data pipelines using Python and/or Type Script/Node.js.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines using Git Hub Actions, ensuring reliable and automated delivery of infrastructure and application changes.
• Build and maintain internal tooling that improves the experience and efficiency of the research…