Senior Systems Engineer

Position Purpose

UW Information Technology (UWIT) is the central information technology organization for the University of Washington, responsible for strategic planning, oversight, and direction of the UW’s IT infrastructure, resources, and services. UWIT provides critical technology support to all three campuses, UW medical centers, and research operations around the world. UWIT partners with the UW community to enable innovation, learning, discovery, and service.

IT Infrastructure provides knowledgeable system design and administration, software engineering, and operational support for academic systems, administrative systems, and research computing. The Computing and Storage team designs, implements, and operates enterprise-level virtual and physical servers, as well as data storage services (storage area networks, network-attached storage, backups, and archiving).

The position is responsible for delivering ongoing operational support for Azure resources and managed server environments, ensuring reliability and performance for customers while building “you get me” relationships.

The position participates directly on migration project teams as part of the University’s Azure Migration Program (AMP), ensuring that newly migrated workloads meet operational, security, monitoring, and governance standards prior to handoff into steady‑state operations. As more customers transition their workloads to Azure, this position provides proactive expert lifecycle support to ensure reliable, secure, and scalable managed and cloud services for customers across the University.

An invested, compassionate, team‑oriented IT professional, this position directly supports the research, teaching, and administrative missions of the University to ensure trusted solutions are delivered.

Oversees complex and innovative engineering efforts, ensuring technical quality and consistency across solutions. Member of the Cloud Center of Excellence, contributing to inform cloud architecture decisions, providing technical expertise, and helping drive adoption of best practices across engineering and external application teams.

• Manage and optimize Azure IaaS, PaaS, and hybrid workloads.
• Support active migration project efforts, assisting in requirements gathering, readiness validation, operational configuration, and post‑migration stabilization.
• Establish and maintain governance, monitoring, cost‑management, and compliance baselines.
• Support customers with differing cloud maturity levels, many of whom rely on UW‑IT to fully operate their cloud‑hosted systems.
• Apply automation‑first approaches (Power Shell, Terraform, Azure Automation) to manage operations at scale.
• Collaborate with technical and non‑technical staff and work effectively across distributed teams.

This position manages, builds new, and sustains critical cloud infrastructure supporting administrative, research, clinical, and academic functions across the University. The work performed directly affects the reliability, security, and performance of University services. As the cloud footprint grows, this position plays a critical role in ensuring:

• High availability and resilience for Azure‑hosted workloads.
• Secure and compliant configurations aligned with enterprise standards.
• Smooth transitions from on‑premises systems into Azure through coordinated migration support.
• Scalable, cost‑effective, and predictable managed‑service operations for customers across the institution.
• Proactively makes technical decisions on design, implementation, performance, and reliability.

• Design, configure, and manage Azure virtual machines, storage, networking, identity integrations, and monitoring configurations.
• Support active Azure migration project work, including workload validation, operational readiness, post‑migration stabilization, and documentation of new environments.
• Implement and maintain automation pipelines for configuration management, patching, compliance, backup, and deployments.
• Manage and optimize cloud‑native data platforms, including Azure SQL…