Strategic Education, Inc is seeking a Senior Cloud Platform Engineer to help design, build, and evolve platforms that enable development teams to safely and efficiently manage their own infrastructure. The role focuses on implementing and refining public cloud computing infrastructure, emphasizing automation, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code.
Responsibilities:
- Design, implement, and operate cloud infrastructure platforms that support application teams across multiple workloads and environments
- Build and maintain Terraform-based infrastructure as code, emphasizing modularity, reusability, and consistency
- Experience supporting and deploying a range of public cloud computing services, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS deployments
- Demonstrable skill and understanding of the concepts of Infrastructure as Code, idempotency, and repeatable tooling
- Strong ability to troubleshoot complex issues stemming from both automation and cloud infrastructure
- Advanced experience and understanding of high-availability, high-performance, multi-regional systems
- Develop and manage GitLab CI pipelines used to plan, validate, and deploy infrastructure and platform components
- Create self-service capabilities that enable development teams to provision and manage infrastructure safely with minimal manual intervention
- Partner with application teams to shift infrastructure and operational concerns left, embedding best practices early in the development lifecycle
- Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across automation pipelines, infrastructure code, and cloud environments
- Participate in on-call rotation, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews to continuously improve platform reliability
- Contribute to compliance, security, and operational reviews by designing guardrails directly into platform tooling
- Continuously improve internal tooling, standards, and documentation to support platform adoption and developer productivity
Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience in cloud or platform engineering roles
- Strong hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code, with Terraform as a primary tool
- Proven experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
- Experience building or operating internal platforms or shared infrastructure tooling used by multiple development teams
- Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure concepts (compute, networking, storage, identity, and security), independent of provider
- Strong troubleshooting skills across infrastructure, automation, and deployment pipelines
- Familiarity with containerized workloads and orchestration concepts (e.g., Kubernetes), even if not a primary specialization
- Ability to collaborate effectively with developers and translate platform capabilities into practical, usable solutions
- Strong communication skills and a pragmatic, engineering-first approach to problem solving
- Exposure to platform engineering concepts such as: Golden paths, Opinionated templates, Guardrails vs. gates
- Associate degree or higher, or 5 years of equivalent Cloud Engineer experience
- Cloud or infrastructure certifications are a plus but not required