Cloud Engineer Associate

Department: IT Cyber Platform Services

Salary/Grade: ITS/77

Job Summary:

This cloud engineer associate role is a member of the Platform Services Cloud Operations team. The team's mission is the support and enablement of Northwestern's overall public cloud presence, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and GitHub accounts owned by Northwestern IT and other units across campus. This position's key responsibilities are leveraging security tools to identify potential vulnerabilities and attack paths, auditing and managing account access, managing service ticket queues, and participating in non-critical cloud engineering tasks, project management, user support, problem resolution, and other related technical and process improvement activities. This is an entry level role into the CI Platform Services Cloud Operations team.

Please note: 24 x 7 availability for rotational on-call support. Available for occasional weekend and evening project and administration work.

Specific Responsibilities:

Cloud Security Monitoring

1. Leverage existing security tools to identify and address potential security misconfigurations across Northwestern's cloud estate
2. Audit cloud account access
3. Maintain resource health and inventory dashboards
4. Responds to security findings using standard response playbook

Cloud Systems Engineering

1. Assists provisioning and deprovisioning cloud environments
2. Manages access to cloud environments
3. Patches and maintains CloudOps-owned resources and automation
4. Manages budgets for cloud environments and responds to budget notifications

Community Participation and Knowledge Sharing

1. Interacts with Northwestern Cloud Community of Practice
2. Reviews and updates internal and external documentation
3. Participates in extramural higher education cloud and IT communities

Miscellaneous

Performs other duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications:

1. Successful completion of a full 4-year course of study in an accredited college or university leading to a bachelor's or higher degree in a major such as computer science, information technology, or related; OR appropriate combination of education and experience.
2. 2 years' general IT or other relevant experience required.

Infrastructure (extends across applications)

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
2. Code Repositories (Git)
3. Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, GitHub

Programming Languages and Frameworks

1. Introductory level of scripting and/or application development experience.

Analytical

1. Critical thinking
2. Decision making
3. Debugging
4. Judgment
5. Problem solving
6. Read & interpret technical drawings
7. Troubleshooting

Project

1. Collaboration and teamwork
2. Facilitate collaboration
3. Functional documentation
4. Iterative & incremental development
5. Organizational skills
6. Planning

Minimum Competencies: (Skills, knowledge, and abilities.)

1. Knowledge of cloud computing concepts
2. Strong oral and written communication skills
3. Empathy and ability to understand customer needs
4. Ability to prioritize and complete tasks

Preferred Qualifications:

1. 1 year of cloud services administration or equivalent experience
2. Strong troubleshooting skills with the ability to understand how a cloud infrastructure is designed (networking, compute, storage)
3. Technical ability to translate business requirements into actionable information technology tasks.
4. Experience delivering technical solutions against desired business outcomes.
5. Experience in testing, evaluating, documenting, and communicating product and technical benefits to solutions.
6. Experience working in a team setting with a scheduled On-call support rotation.

Preferred Competencies: (Skills, knowledge, and abilities)

1. Collaboration and Communication skills.
2. Knowledge of industry Information Technology best practices.
3. Planning and organizational skills.

Target hiring range for this position will be between $62,124-$77,334 per year. Offered salary will be determined by the applicant's education, experience, knowledge, skills and abilities, as well as internal equity and alignment with market data.

Benefits:

At Northwestern, we are proud to provide meaningful, competitive, high-quality health care plans, retirement benefits, tuition discounts and more! Visit us at to learn more.

Work-Life and Wellness:

Northwestern offers comprehensive programs and services to help you and your family navigate life's challenges and opportunities, and adopt and maintain healthy lifestyles.

We support flexible work arrangements where possible and programs to help you locate and pay for quality, affordable childcare and senior/adult care. Visit us at to learn more.

Professional Growth & Development:

Northwestern supports employee career development in all circumstances whether your workspace is on campus or at home. If you're interested in developing your professional potential or continuing your formal education, we offer a variety of tools and resources. Visit us at to learn more.