Cloud Engineer II

Position: Advancement Cloud Engineer II
Job Description

The USF Advancement division is leading a modern, relationship-driven approach to fundraising, alumni engagement, and donor impact, focused on strengthening lifelong connections and driving meaningful results for the university. The Technology Innovation and Strategic Solutions team leads the design and delivery of the division's digital ecosystem, bringing together data, platforms, and AI-enabled capabilities to support how work gets done across Advancement.

Through our core pillars, Data Intelligence & Trust, Innovation & Digital Experience, and Enterprise Digital Platforms & Engineering, we ensure data is trusted, solutions are adopted, and systems are built to scale.

Our North Star is Human Connections, multiplied by intelligence. We use trusted data and ethical AI to enhance decision-making, strengthen engagement, and enable our teams to focus on what matters most: relationships and impact.

The Cloud Engineer is a hands-on technical role responsible for building, migrating, modernizing, and operating Advancement's cloud platform ecosystem. This role plays a critical part in the transition from on-premises systems to a scalable, Azure-based environment, ensuring platforms are secure, reliable, and optimized for long-term performance.

This position supports the full lifecycle of platform engineering, including migration, re-architecture, integration, monitoring, and continuous improvement. The Cloud Engineer works across systems, data, and vendor platforms to ensure Advancement's digital environment is resilient, scalable, and ready to support analytics and AI capabilities.

Responsibilities

Cloud Platform Engineering and Modernization

• Design, build, and support Azure cloud environments, including compute, networking, storage, identity, and platform services

• Lead and support migration of on-premise systems and applications into Azure, including assessment, planning, testing, and cutover

• Rearchitect applications and services where needed to align with modern cloud patterns, security standards, and scalability requirements

• Establish repeatable patterns for hosting, integration, monitoring, backup, and disaster recovery

• Implement automation and infrastructure as code to enable consistent, scalable deployments

Platform Operations, Monitoring, and Optimization

• Monitor system health, availability, performance, and reliability across cloud platforms and applications

• Develop and maintain alerting, dashboards, runbooks, and operational procedures

• Troubleshoot and resolve cloud, application, and integration issues and perform root cause analysis

• Continuously optimize platform performance, cost, reliability, and scalability

• Strengthen observability and reduce operational risk across systems

Application and Integration Support

• Support modernization and ongoing operation of applications, APIs, databases, and integrations

• Ensure systems are properly integrated across CRM, data platforms, Microsoft services, and vendor solutions

• Support CI/CD, deployment pipelines, and environment management across development and production environments

• Contribute to decisions on whether systems should be migrated as is, replatformed, refactored, replaced, or retired

Platform and Ecosystem Support

• Support Advancement's CRM and data platform ecosystem from a technical hosting and operations perspective

• Ensure cloud hosted platforms are secure, integrated, and scalable

• Collaborate with Data Intelligence & Trust to support data platform readiness while maintaining clear separation of data ownership and platform operations

Vendor and SaaS Platform Stewardship

• Partner with vendors and platform providers to ensure systems are properly configured, integrated, and supported

• Evaluate technical requirements, integrations, and performance of vendor platforms

• Troubleshoot and escalate issues with external systems and services

• Ensure vendor solutions align with Advancement's technical, security, and operational standards

Security, Risk, and Governance Alignment

• Apply secure configuration, access control, monitoring, logging, backup, and recovery practices

• Align cloud environments with university…