SOW - Cloud Engineer / Platform Support Specialist - Plano, TX.

Job Title: Cloud Engineer / Platform Support Specialist
Location: Plano, TX
Overview: We are seeking a highly skilled Cloud Engineer / Platform Support Specialist to join our team. This role involves providing advanced-level support for a cloud platform within a large enterprise environment, hosting thousands of applications on AWS. The successful candidate will act as the first point of contact for application developers encountering technical issues, leveraging a ticketing system to manage incidents. This position requires a strong foundation in coding, software, infrastructure, and cloud technologies, and operates within a follow-the-sun support model. It requires strong communications including the ability the clearly articulate problem statements and solutions.
Key Responsibilities:

• Deliver incident management and advanced-level support for the AWS Platform, hosting a large volume of applications
• Serve as the initial point of contact for application developers via a ticketing system.
• Communicate effectively with users at various organizational levels.
• Implement and utilize automation to support the scalability of the environment.
• Optimize operational processes to enhance efficiency, reliability, and security.
• Train users to self-diagnose and troubleshoot issues for expedited resolution.
• Conduct thorough investigations into issues to identify root causes and document strategies to prevent recurrence.
• Provide support for public cloud environments, particularly AWS.
• Manage events and incidents efficiently.
• Develop and implement scalable automation processes to handle tasks in a large-scale environment.
• Analyze and debug incidents, follow up to gather feedback and prevent future issues.
• Support different development environments, including Unix, Linux, Mainframe, and Windows.

Required Skills and Experience:

• Extensive cloud experience, particularly with AWS (S3, ECS).
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) : Experience deploying, managing, and troubleshooting Kubernetes clusters on AWS EKS.
• Kubernetes Administration : Strong understanding of Kubernetes architecture, including pods, deployments, services, and networking.
• Helm & Kubernetes Operators : Familiarity with Helm charts for package management and Kubernetes Operators for automation.
• Cluster Security & RBAC : Knowledge of Kubernetes Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), security policies, and best practices.
• Scaling & Performance Optimization : Experience with autoscaling, load balancing, and optimizing Kubernetes workloads.
• Monitoring & Logging : Hands-on experience with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Fluentd, or AWS CloudWatch for monitoring Kubernetes clusters.
• Containerization & Orchestration : Strong experience in Docker and other AWS containerized services (ECS and AWS Fargate)
• Terraform : Strong experience in writing, managing, troubleshooting and optimizing Terraform configurations for AWS infrastructure.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Expertise : Deep understanding of IaC principles, including automation, version control, and modularization.
• AWS Cloud Services : Hands-on experience with AWS services such as EC2, S3, Lambda, VPC, IAM, and CloudFormation.
• Security Best Practices : Knowledge of AWS security policies, identity and access management (IAM), and compliance standards.
• CI/CD Integration : Experience integrating Terraform with CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments. Commitment to automating processes for continuous improvement.
• Proficiency in SDLC: with the ability to read code (Java and Python).
• Troubleshooting & Optimization : Ability to diagnose and resolve infrastructure issues, optimize performance, and ensure scalability. Strong troubleshooting and diagnostic skills for security and access issues in a large enterprise environment.
• Excellent communication skills: Ability to analyze details, understand incident causation, and implement preventive measures to ensure reliability and security.

Nice to have:

• Database management skills (Oracle DBA, Cassandra DBA, CockroachDB) include performance tuning, connectivity, backups, indexes, and monitoring alarms.
• Middleware and messaging experience (Kafka, MQ).
• Experience with Tomcat.
• System engineering and administration skills (Unix/Linux).
• Java or Python Development