What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior IT Operations Engineer position at CloudZero?
CloudZero is hiring a Senior IT Operations Engineer who treats IT as a product instead of a help desk. You will work with our IT leadership to keep our internal systems quiet, fast, and secure. You will also lean on AI every day to do it.
The role is hybrid out of our Boston office. Some flexibility outside East Coast hours is helpful, given our employees and customers are global.
Our Operating Philosophy
We measure success by high-quality outcomes, not volume; not by tickets closed, but by tickets that never get opened.
Every helpdesk ticket that hits our support tool, is a signal. Something about a system, a workflow, or a piece of documentation failed a person. The job is to look under the signal, ask why the question came up in the first place, and fix the upstream cause so the next ten people don't run into the same wall.
That Means
We use AI tooling every day, and the right person for this opportunity has an inquisitive mindset and has already ingrained this new way of working with strong human judgment.
What The Role Looks Like Day-to-day
The role is hybrid out of our Boston office. Some flexibility outside East Coast hours is helpful, given our employees and customers are global.
Our Operating Philosophy
We measure success by high-quality outcomes, not volume; not by tickets closed, but by tickets that never get opened.
Every helpdesk ticket that hits our support tool, is a signal. Something about a system, a workflow, or a piece of documentation failed a person. The job is to look under the signal, ask why the question came up in the first place, and fix the upstream cause so the next ten people don't run into the same wall.
That Means
- When a ticket lands, your first instinct should be "what would make this ticket not exist next week?"
- You will build automations, self-service paths, and documentation that retire whole categories of tickets at a time.
- Patterns in our helpdesk data should shape your roadmap. You will spot recurring asks, group them by root cause, and chip away at them.
- A great week ends with fewer open issues and fewer total inbound tickets than the week before.
We use AI tooling every day, and the right person for this opportunity has an inquisitive mindset and has already ingrained this new way of working with strong human judgment.
- You reach for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or ChatGPT before problem-solving manually.
- You use AI to draft scripts, parse logs, summarize vendor docs, write runbooks, and break apart messy projects.
- You can talk credibly about which AI tools are good at what, where they fall over, and how to prompt them well.
- You try new AI tools as they show up, and you drop them when they don't earn their keep.
What The Role Looks Like Day-to-day
- Own and maintain the core systems the company runs on(JAMF, Okta, Slack, Jira, Google Workspace)
- Build automations in Okta Workflows or from scratch that quietly handle work that used to be tickets.
- Write Python and Bash that can connect to our SaaS tools together.
- Treat the Helpdesk queue as a data source. Analyze it, categorize it, and root-cause aggressively.
- Partner with Security so new tooling is safe by default, not safe by review.
- Provide responsive, human first-touch support when issues reach your queue, then address the root cause to prevent repeat requests.
- Drive cross-functional IT projects from intake through rollout, with stakeholders bought in along the way.
- Partner with the People team to ensure a smooth employee lifecycle experience
- 5 years running and configuring real IT or cloud infrastructure at a growing company.
- 2 years of hands-on automation work in Workato, Okta Workflows, Python, Bash, or similar.
- Real AI fluency. You have used modern AI tools to ship actual work, not just an experiment.
- Familiarity with the IT toolkit: JAMF (including packaging and deployment), Okta SSO, Slack, Jira, Google Workspace.
- 2 years of operational time inside GCP, Snowflake, and/or AWS.
- Strong API instincts. You have stitched SaaS tools together with webhooks, REST APIs, and event hooks.
- A root-cause mindset. You are not satisfied with closing a ticket without knowing why it appeared.
- A bias for shipping. You can take a vague request and produce a clean outcome.
- Real partnership instincts with security, not box-checking.
- You are exceptional with people and have a customer-first mindset. First-touch support is part of the job, and how you make someone feel matters.
- Experience automating employee lifecycle (joiners, movers, leavers), including directly integrating HRIS systems.
- Time at a cloud-native or developer-tooling company.
- AV and meeting-room tech experience for our in-office spaces.
- Practical familiarity with SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar frameworks.
- Familiarity with UKG or other HRIS systems is a plus.
- Examples of AI agents or automations you have built that retired a recurring class of work.