What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Cloud Engineer position at Community Impact?
Description
We are looking for a passionate Senior Cloud Engineer to join our mission-driven team. This is a hybrid role based in Pflugerville, TX, offering a balance of in-office collaboration and remote flexibility.
At Community Impact, Faith leads us to believe we are here to accomplish something great, and our Passion drives us to deliver the best experience to our readers. We are moving from a legacy monolithic server to a modern, containerized cloud environment. We need an architect who embodies Innovation—someone willing to look beyond traditional practices to build a system capable of handling 15,000 concurrent users.
Core Engineering Challenges
This role is about defining Quality—where excellence is the minimum standard. You will ensure our readers get instant access to news, regardless of traffic spikes.
- Scalability as Standard: You will architect a distributed system that eliminates cold starts and handles "thundering herd" traffic patterns, specifically push notifications that cause instant spikes.
- Modernization: You will transition our architecture to AWS ECS Fargate and Amazon Aurora (Serverless v2), ensuring we are using the most efficient, forward-looking tools available.
- Resilience: You will build CI/CD pipelines that ensure zero downtime, reflecting our commitment to reliability for our users.
Key Responsibilities
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Architect and provision the entire cloud infrastructure to ensure reproducible, scalable environments.
- Database Management: Oversee the implementation of Amazon Aurora and Amazon OpenSearch, creating efficient connection pooling and handling complex geo-queries.
- Security & Integrity: In alignment with our value of Integrity, you will implement uncompromised security best practices, including WAF configuration, Cloudflare DDoS protection, and strict VPC networking.
- Monitoring & Optimization: Manage caching strategies (Cloudflare CDN/ElastiCache/Redis) to reduce database load and preemptively address bottlenecks.
- Cross-Functional Work: Work directly with our development team and external vendors.
The Tech Stack
We are looking for an engineer who doesn't just know these tools but understands how to orchestrate them for high performance:
- Compute: AWS EC2, AWS ECS Fargate, Docker, PHP, Node.js
- Data: MS SQL Server, Amazon Aurora (Serverless v2), PostgreSQL, PostGIS
- Search: Amazon OpenSearch (Elasticsearch)
- Caching: ElastiCache (Redis)
- OS & Scripting: Linux, Windows, Bash, Python
Technical Qualifications
- AWS Ecosystem: Deep knowledge of EC2/RDS, with specific expertise in modern serverless implementations like ECS Fargate and Aurora Serverless.
- Containerization: Expert-level understanding of Docker and container orchestration.
- High-Volume Traffic: Experience managing high-concurrency environments and burst traffic events.
- OS Proficiency: Strong skills in Linux environments, scripting (Bash/Python), and OS-level tuning.
Preferred Skills
- Build and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines to automate testing and deployments, ensuring zero downtime during updates.
- Experience deploying Node.js, Angular and/or PHP applications.
- Familiarity with PostGIS and implementing "Nearby" geospatial features.
- Experience with Adobe Indesign Serve.