Staff Cloud Engineer

Staff Cloud Engineer

At Western Governors University, technology is a critical enabler of our mission to expand access to high-quality education. As a Staff Cloud Engineer, you will serve as one of the university's most senior technical contributors, driving the architecture, automation, and evolution of our AWS cloud platform. This role is designed for an experienced cloud engineering leader who thrives on solving complex technical challenges, defining engineering standards, mentoring engineers, and building highly scalable, secure, and resilient cloud infrastructure.

You'll influence cloud strategy across the organization while partnering with software engineering, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, platform engineering, and operations teams. This is a hands-on technical leadership position—not a people management role.

What You'll Do

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of enterprise-scale AWS cloud platforms supporting mission-critical university systems.
• Define long-term cloud infrastructure roadmaps that improve scalability, reliability, security, operational excellence, and cost optimization.
• Architect Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions using Terraform and modern cloud automation practices.
• Design highly available, fault-tolerant, multi-account AWS environments following AWS Well-Architected Framework principles.
• Build and maintain enterprise CI/CD platforms that enable secure, repeatable, and automated software delivery.
• Develop automation that eliminates manual operational work and improves platform reliability.
• Design and implement observability strategies including centralized logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.
• Partner with application engineering teams to build cloud-native architectures and accelerate Dev Ops adoption.
• Architect container and serverless platforms using Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) and AWS serverless technologies.
• Collaborate with cybersecurity teams to implement secure-by-design cloud architectures, identity management, governance, and compliance controls.
• Lead performance optimization, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and resiliency initiatives.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues across distributed systems and cloud services.
• Establish cloud engineering standards, best practices, and architectural patterns across the organization.
• Mentor Senior and Cloud Engineers through technical leadership, architecture reviews, and coaching.
• Serve as a technical advisor for cloud modernization and digital transformation initiatives.
• Evaluate emerging cloud technologies and recommend adoption where appropriate.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 10+ years of progressive experience designing, building, and supporting enterprise infrastructure, cloud platforms, Dev Ops, or Site Reliability Engineering environments.
• 5+ years of hands-on AWS engineering experience supporting large-scale production environments.
• Deep expertise designing and operating highly available cloud infrastructure.
• Extensive experience building Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
• Strong Linux systems administration experience.
• Experience building and operating enterprise CI/CD platforms.
• Strong programming or scripting experience with Python, Go, Bash, or similar automation languages.
• Experience supporting mission-critical production systems with high availability requirements.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and providing technical leadership across multiple teams.
• Excellent communication, documentation, and architectural decision-making skills.

This is designated as an in-office position located in Salt Lake City, UT.

Why WGU?

At WGU, cloud engineering is foundational to delivering innovative educational experiences  a Staff Cloud Engineer, you'll have the opportunity to shape the future of our cloud platform, mentor exceptional engineers, and build modern infrastructure that supports millions of student interactions each year.