Cloud Architect

Location: Denver, CO

Duration: !2 Months

Dept: Colorado Governor's Office of Information Technology

• The Cloud Architect is responsible for analyzing cloud technology offerings, primarily focusing on the Google Cloud Platform and designing a reliable, secure, high-performing, cost-effective application-hosting environment. This involves determining the best network design, setting standards regarding VPC design and deployment, ensuring appropriate role-based access controls are established, designing deployable instance templates, designing a suitable approach to automated provisioning of instances and apps, and establishing the monitoring and reporting required to ensure the environment is stable, capacity is well managed, and cost reporting is accurate and timely.
• The Cloud Architect will be responsible for crafting, publishing, socializing, and overseeing adherence to the standards they establish and modifying them to achieve the strategic goals of OIT and the tactical needs of the projects deployed to the cloud. In addition, they will drive continuous improvement within the CloudOps team, as well as lifecycle management and exploration into evolving cloud-based solutions. You will handle the research, recommendations, and day-to-day interactions with vendors that have been partnered to help meet work unit and organizational objectives.

Some of the primary duties and responsibilities include:

• Maintain expert knowledge and experience with all aspects of Google Cloud Platform to design and build Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) capabilities on that platform.
• Participating risk and security vulnerability assessments and documenting path to remediation in the form of a roadmap
• Conducting gap analysis on the efficiency of operations and governance and documenting path to increased maturity in the form of a roadmap
• Analyzing overhead and shared costs and contributing to the definition of pricing and funding model for services
• Design and oversee construction/configuration of Google Cloud Platform and automation to allow consumption of services.
• Define and document standards, best practices, and procedures (SOPs) for IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS (via IaC) on Google Cloud Platform that align with established tool stack and architecture standards
• Create design documents/diagrams to show environment topology, and data/process flows
• Monitoring system availability across a multi-vendor technology stack to maximize availability and rapidly diagnose/resolve issues
• Act as Tier-3 escalation point for on-call/break-fix efforts to diagnose and resolve problems that Cloud Engineers cannot resolve with vendor support

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• At least five (5) years of infrastructure development experience with hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform foundation services related to computing, network, storage, content delivery, administration and security, deployment and management, and automation technologies.
• Experience architecting highly available systems that utilize load balancing, horizontal scalability, and high availability
• Deep domain expertise in cloud infrastructure solutions (i.e. Windows and Linux IaaS, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, Security, Management, Storage, Networking, OSS, containers, and Infrastructure as code technology), breadth of technical experience, and technical aptitude to learn and adjust to new technologies and cloud trends required.
• Experience and understanding of large-scale infrastructure deployments in enterprise-wide environments are required.
• Experience with automated Continuous Integration/Delivery
• Experience with automation/configuration management using Terraform, Ansible, or similar
• Scripting skills in Python, Bash, and PowerShell
• Google Foundational certification

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Professional Cloud Architect certification
• Experience with AzureDevops