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.

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:

Job Description

Job Duties

• Demonstrates big picture thinking and can not only design but more importantly implement.
• Approaches customer issues strategically, understanding different business requirements and challenges with implementations.
• Participates in new systems architectural reviews from a governance perspective and provides analysis feedback in post deployment critiques.
• Plans and manages hardware platform design, such as identifying components, standardized infrastructure components, serviceability, and creating systems solutions and frameworks.
• Performs analysis of systems and identifies problem areas, identifies ways to enhance existing systems, and develops viable solutions.
• Develops and trains Engineers on Dev Ops and CI/CD methodologies and tools for automated infrastructure code test, integration, deployment, and assurance.
• Provides technical support to education segment product teams for various activities such as with testing, validation, sustaining, value engineering, and Dev Ops required for the products we support.
• Publishes white papers, how-to articles, training materials, and presents at our internal summits annually.
• Ensures our systems are built on HA (High Availability) Architecture and provides native Backup/DR support within our defined RTO/RPO requirements.
• Mentors one or more Associate Level Engineers within our Platform Services group and motivates them to produce innovative solutions to the University’s architectural obstacles.
• Performs other job-related duties as assigned.

KSAs

• Expertise implementing AWS services in a variety of distributed computing environments
• Experience with highly available and fault-tolerant enterprise and web-scale software deployments
• Expertise in infrastructure automation through Dev Ops 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 Dev Ops, Scrum, and ITIL concepts
• Understanding of Virtualization and/or Containerization
• Understanding of Git Flow model and Continuous Integration with Travis or Jenkins
• Experience using Configuration Management Tools such as Chef and Salt Stack
• Experience using monitoring tools like New Relic, Nagios, Cloud Watch or IPMon
• Experience and ability to work directly with customers creating cloud infrastructure solutions, leading conversations with key business stakeholders reviewing pros and cons, risks, and best practices.
• Ability to lead the design, development, and deployment of business software at scale or current hands-on technology infrastructure, network, compute, storage, and virtualization experience.
• Effective communication and…