Western Governors University
Principal Cloud Architect - Craft Education
Western Governors University, Tampa, Florida, us, 33646
Principal Cloud Architect - Craft Education
Join to apply for the Principal Cloud Architect - Craft Education role at Western Governors University.
If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.
Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals.
Salary range: Pay Range $157,000.00 - $243,400.00. Grade: Technical 411.
Overview The Principal Cloud Architect is a position of technical expertise, influence, and leadership in the realm of technology. The role applies their expert knowledge to ensure best practices and well engineered architecture across the department. They will be a key stakeholder and initiator of major changes to processes, engineering practices, and system administration. This position will address critical issues and initiatives across Craft Education. It requires an extensive and deep understanding of cutting edge practices and innovative approaches to problems. Principal Cloud Architects are also tasked with establishing and maintaining a positive and productive culture based on the WGU Leadership Principles.
Responsibilities
Utilizes AI (LLMs, Agentic, MCP, and others) to gain efficiency in execution of infrastructure modification for greater delivery speed.
Big picture thinker who can design and implement solutions.
Strategically approaches issues, understanding different business and technical requirements and challenges with implementations.
Participate in architectural reviews from a governance perspective and provide analysis feedback.
Plan and manage hardware platform design such as identifying components, standardized infrastructure components, serviceability and creating system solutions and frameworks.
Perform analysis of systems to identify problem areas, identify ways of enhancing existing systems, and develop viable solutions.
Develop, mentor, monitor progress towards goals and train engineers on DevOps and CI CD methodologies and tools for automated infrastructure code test, integration, deployment, and assurance.
Provide technical support to product teams for activities such as testing, validation, sustaining, value engineering, and DevOps required for the products we support.
Ensure our systems are built on high availability architecture and provide native backup and disaster recovery support within defined RTO RPO.
Performs other related duties as assigned.
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
Ability to travel to client locations when needed.
Expertise implementing AWS services in distributed computing environments.
Experience with highly available and fault tolerant enterprise and web scale software deployments desired.
Expertise in infrastructure automation through IaC scripting such as Terraform, shell, and PowerShell.
Strong practical Linux and Windows based systems administration skills in a Cloud environment (AWS, Azure, Google) or Virtualized environment.
Experience leading cloud operations, including data assurance, monitoring, alerting and notifications.
Competencies
Organizational Impact: Works proactively to anticipate and prevent highly complex problems across disciplines. Develops and establishes technical processes. Provides solutions for extremely specialized, complex technical issues. Fully understands and quantifies program risks with broad, significant impact.
Problem Solving and Decision Making: Develops and accomplishes goals and objectives independently. Leads and integrates multiple project teams and broad assignments, driving decisions and results. Provides strategy and guidance to leadership and to develop technical talent. Sets and models high standards for effective interactions across groups.
Communication and Influence: Communicates with experts within and outside the organization about significant technology advancements. Influences others to accept and understand technical direction, new concepts and approaches. Able to communicate with and influence senior executive leadership on strategic matters. Often conducts briefings to senior leaders within and outside the technical function.
Leadership: Provides guidance, coaching, and training to other employees across the Craft Technology Organization within an area of expertise. Manages large, complex projects or initiatives involving cross-functional teams. Demonstrates ability to create work breakdown structures and project plans.
Job Qualifications Minimum Qualifications
Typically requires a university degree or equivalent experience.
Department Specific Minimum Qualifications
6+ Years of IT Production Workload Experience
3+ Years of combined experience in the primary AWS services VPC, DNS, IAM, EC2, ECS, EKS, ALB, RDS, Route53 and S3
3+ Years of experience in Configuration Management using CloudFormation and Terraform
3+ years of extensive experience using automation tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and CloudFormation
3+ years of extensive experience in governance tools like AWS Config and Inspector
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional or Solutions Architect Professional (Strong candidates who do not have these certifications can be hired but must obtain their required certifications within 6 months of hiring date)
Preferred Qualifications
Experience creating cloud infrastructure solutions, leading conversations with technology leaders, reviewing pros and cons, risks, and best practices.
Expertise in cloud spend optimization.
Expertise leading the design, development and deployment of software at scale, infrastructure, network, compute, storage, and virtualization.
Understanding of the standard software development life cycle (SDLC) and Agile iterative methodologies.
Expertise with compliance and risk management requirements (eg. security, PCI, privacy, SOX, HIPAA etc.).
JSON and YAML expertise.
Physical Requirements
Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
Must be able to lift up to 15 pounds at times.
Disclaimer This Job Description has been designed to indicate the general nature, essential duties, and responsibilities of work performed by employees within this classification. It does not contain a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications that are required of the employee to do this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice. This Job Description does not constitute a contract of employment and the University may exercise its employment-at-will rights at any time.
Position and Application Details Full-Time Regular Positions: This is a full-time, regular position (40 standard weekly hours) that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.
Additional Information Disclaimer: The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It is not all-inclusive.
Accommodations Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at recruiting@wgu.edu.
Equal Employment Opportunity All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic as required by law.
Seniority level
Mid-Senior level
Employment type
Full-time
Job function
Engineering and Information Technology
Industries
Higher Education
#J-18808-Ljbffr
If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.
Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals.
Salary range: Pay Range $157,000.00 - $243,400.00. Grade: Technical 411.
Overview The Principal Cloud Architect is a position of technical expertise, influence, and leadership in the realm of technology. The role applies their expert knowledge to ensure best practices and well engineered architecture across the department. They will be a key stakeholder and initiator of major changes to processes, engineering practices, and system administration. This position will address critical issues and initiatives across Craft Education. It requires an extensive and deep understanding of cutting edge practices and innovative approaches to problems. Principal Cloud Architects are also tasked with establishing and maintaining a positive and productive culture based on the WGU Leadership Principles.
Responsibilities
Utilizes AI (LLMs, Agentic, MCP, and others) to gain efficiency in execution of infrastructure modification for greater delivery speed.
Big picture thinker who can design and implement solutions.
Strategically approaches issues, understanding different business and technical requirements and challenges with implementations.
Participate in architectural reviews from a governance perspective and provide analysis feedback.
Plan and manage hardware platform design such as identifying components, standardized infrastructure components, serviceability and creating system solutions and frameworks.
Perform analysis of systems to identify problem areas, identify ways of enhancing existing systems, and develop viable solutions.
Develop, mentor, monitor progress towards goals and train engineers on DevOps and CI CD methodologies and tools for automated infrastructure code test, integration, deployment, and assurance.
Provide technical support to product teams for activities such as testing, validation, sustaining, value engineering, and DevOps required for the products we support.
Ensure our systems are built on high availability architecture and provide native backup and disaster recovery support within defined RTO RPO.
Performs other related duties as assigned.
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
Ability to travel to client locations when needed.
Expertise implementing AWS services in distributed computing environments.
Experience with highly available and fault tolerant enterprise and web scale software deployments desired.
Expertise in infrastructure automation through IaC scripting such as Terraform, shell, and PowerShell.
Strong practical Linux and Windows based systems administration skills in a Cloud environment (AWS, Azure, Google) or Virtualized environment.
Experience leading cloud operations, including data assurance, monitoring, alerting and notifications.
Competencies
Organizational Impact: Works proactively to anticipate and prevent highly complex problems across disciplines. Develops and establishes technical processes. Provides solutions for extremely specialized, complex technical issues. Fully understands and quantifies program risks with broad, significant impact.
Problem Solving and Decision Making: Develops and accomplishes goals and objectives independently. Leads and integrates multiple project teams and broad assignments, driving decisions and results. Provides strategy and guidance to leadership and to develop technical talent. Sets and models high standards for effective interactions across groups.
Communication and Influence: Communicates with experts within and outside the organization about significant technology advancements. Influences others to accept and understand technical direction, new concepts and approaches. Able to communicate with and influence senior executive leadership on strategic matters. Often conducts briefings to senior leaders within and outside the technical function.
Leadership: Provides guidance, coaching, and training to other employees across the Craft Technology Organization within an area of expertise. Manages large, complex projects or initiatives involving cross-functional teams. Demonstrates ability to create work breakdown structures and project plans.
Job Qualifications Minimum Qualifications
Typically requires a university degree or equivalent experience.
Department Specific Minimum Qualifications
6+ Years of IT Production Workload Experience
3+ Years of combined experience in the primary AWS services VPC, DNS, IAM, EC2, ECS, EKS, ALB, RDS, Route53 and S3
3+ Years of experience in Configuration Management using CloudFormation and Terraform
3+ years of extensive experience using automation tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and CloudFormation
3+ years of extensive experience in governance tools like AWS Config and Inspector
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional or Solutions Architect Professional (Strong candidates who do not have these certifications can be hired but must obtain their required certifications within 6 months of hiring date)
Preferred Qualifications
Experience creating cloud infrastructure solutions, leading conversations with technology leaders, reviewing pros and cons, risks, and best practices.
Expertise in cloud spend optimization.
Expertise leading the design, development and deployment of software at scale, infrastructure, network, compute, storage, and virtualization.
Understanding of the standard software development life cycle (SDLC) and Agile iterative methodologies.
Expertise with compliance and risk management requirements (eg. security, PCI, privacy, SOX, HIPAA etc.).
JSON and YAML expertise.
Physical Requirements
Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
Must be able to lift up to 15 pounds at times.
Disclaimer This Job Description has been designed to indicate the general nature, essential duties, and responsibilities of work performed by employees within this classification. It does not contain a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications that are required of the employee to do this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice. This Job Description does not constitute a contract of employment and the University may exercise its employment-at-will rights at any time.
Position and Application Details Full-Time Regular Positions: This is a full-time, regular position (40 standard weekly hours) that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.
Additional Information Disclaimer: The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It is not all-inclusive.
Accommodations Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at recruiting@wgu.edu.
Equal Employment Opportunity All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic as required by law.
Seniority level
Mid-Senior level
Employment type
Full-time
Job function
Engineering and Information Technology
Industries
Higher Education
#J-18808-Ljbffr