Cloud Operations Engineer

Our developers generate a steady stream of infrastructure requests: new environments, resources, access, fixes, all the things they need from AWS to keep building, and that demand is growing.

This is not a ticket-closing job, nor is it click-ops. Our infrastructure lives in code on AWS, our work runs through Jira, and we would rather build a self-serve path than answer the same request twice. You’ll be the person the team comes to when they need something from the cloud, and your real job is to make the common answers repeatable, so the team stops waiting on them.

Infrastructure is what the rest of engineering builds on, so when it’s slow, everyone is slow. We’re hiring for this now, proactively, before that dependency outgrows being a side task on someone’s plate. The work is visible, funded, and unblocked.

Why Join Us?

Smart Panda Tools builds the enterprise infrastructure that higher education institutions rely on to modernize transcript evaluation, automate credit articulation, and protect their academic authority. Our Student Mobility Suite is used by over 200 universities to process millions of transcripts without replacing the systems those institutions already depend on.

We are a team of higher education veterans, engineers, and enterprise operations experts. Many of us have sat in the Registrar’s chair, managed enterprise IT systems, and built the infrastructure to connect them. We build the technology we wish we had.

The people who thrive here care deeply about doing their best work. They would rather automate a task than do it twice, and would rather build infrastructure that runs itself than infrastructure they have to babysit. They bring strong opinions while remaining curious, and they hold themselves to the standard our customers trust us with.

Administrative friction should never obstruct the path to great education. If that resonates, we’d like to work with you.

What You'll Own:

• The request queue. The infrastructure work the dev team generates, tracked in Jira. You triage it, respond to it, and facilitate the solution, and you set the rhythm so nothing sits. You’re who the team comes to for anything AWS.
• AWS, as code. Provisioning, environments, networking, IAM, storage, and the resources the team runs on, managed through Terraform across our AWS accounts. Repeatable infrastructure, not click-ops, and kept healthy and predictable as the team leans on it.
• Making the common case self-serve. Push the requests you see over and over into automation and infrastructure as code, so the team gets what it needs without waiting on a ticket. The best version of this job deletes half of its own queue.
• The operating cadence. Provisioning and access workflows, environment upkeep, and the routines that keep the platform predictable. Much of this lives in Jira, and you’ll keep those workflows honest, set the rhythm, automate what you can, and hold the calendar on the rest. Keep a sensible eye on the AWS bill along the way, so we’re not paying for what we don’t use.
• Whatever comes next. As the team and the platform grow, you’ll help scope where the infrastructure goes next.

Required Qualifications:

• Hands-on AWS experience across the core services: compute (including ECS and Lambda), VPC networking, IAM, RDS, storage, and logging. You’ve operated real infrastructure, not just stood up a demo.
• Comfort with infrastructure as code using Terraform. You can read an unfamiliar codebase, extend a module, and review someone else’s pull request.
• Experience working request-to-resolution with a development team: you can take a vague “we need X” and turn it into a clean, durable solution.
• A strong bias toward automation. You’d rather delete a manual process than repeat it.

We’re open from associate through senior on this one. What matters is solid hands-on AWS and infrastructure as code, and the instinct to turn a repeated request into a repeatable solution, more than years on a title.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Cloudflare: DNS, CDN, WAF, and edge configuration.
• Jira administration and workflow management.
• CI/CD and pipeline experience.
• Experience building or running infrastructure at a company under 200 people, where you wear several hats.

Good to Know:

• We’re open on seniority, associate through senior, and the salary band reflects that range.
• This is an individual contributor role. Experience managing a team is not required, and you won’t be managing one here.
• You don’t need a big-company background or a platform-engineering title to be a fit.