Cloud Operations Engineer

Cloud Operations Engineer / AWS Production Support
Location: Reston, VA

 Cloud Operations Engineer / AWS Production Support 

Position Description 
CGI has an immediate need for a Cloud Operations Engineer (AWS Production Support) to join our financial services team in Reston, VA. This is an exciting full-time opportunity to work in a fast-paced team environment supporting production systems for one of the largest leaders in the secondary mortgage industry. Our long-term, trusted relationship with this client has resulted in a stable and innovative work environment. 

• We partner with 15 of the top 20 banks globally, and our top 10 banking clients have worked with us for an average of 26 years! 
• We offer a competitive total compensation package that includes medical, dental, vision, 401k, paid vacation, and much more – and all CGI benefits begin on your first day of employment! 

Your future duties and responsibilities 
Under minimal supervision, provide operations support for office or business unit users of proprietary or custom application software in a 24/7/365 environment supporting Cloud Operations. Position will require some work during non-traditional business hours to support large scale cloud platforms that support mission critical applications, take point on end to end support and smooth operations of cloud based infrastructure, support change windows, incident response and resolution and other scheduled maintenance activities. Will be trained and required to follow Incident, Change and Problem standards. Individual will gain business and application knowledge through training and resolving Production incidents and inquiries. 

Key Job Functions 
Incident Management 
1. Triage and resolve Production incidents related to the cloud platform and participate in root cause analysis and post mortem discussions. 
2. Provide on the job training and support to new and junior team members as required. 
3. Analyze cloud platform related Production incidents and engage business teams(s) to determine impact of incident. 
4. Work with application support members and cloud support vendors to identify a work-around if permanent solution cannot be reached in a timely manner. Provide a collaborative conduit between application/support teams and the Cloud vendor support such as AWS, Azure etc. 
5. Escalate to team leads in a timely manner when resolution cannot be achieved. 
6. Help recreate and test possible solutions and/or workarounds in lower environments prior to implementing in Production. 
7. Work closely with Cloud Engineering team and other support staff to identify and resolve incidents and create and implement long term remediation techniques and fixes. 
8. Identify and document known issues and work with Cloud engineering partners and vendor support to address reoccurrence and the identified workaround activity 

Operations, Monitoring, and Capacity Planning 
1. Cloud operations and infrastructure management - rehydration activities, IAM, security and compliance, availability, data protection, authentication and authorization, capacity and resource management, service metering and operational cost oversight, disaster recovery and mitigation. 
2. Create processes designed to measure system effectiveness and identify areas for improvement. 
3. Create processes intended to provide environment security, as well as automated processes to provide information on current specifications. 
4. Stay abreast of new technologies in the field and provide recommendations to organizational management on new solutions. 
5. Oversee the selection of orchestration tooling, as well as compliance audits and reporting. 
6. Identify, correct, and enhance important software tools; seek ways to enhance systems operations, with a focus on automation and minimizing cost. 
7. Build effective monitoring, alerts, and metrics for production services. 
8. Plan for adequate capacity of systems based on utilization metrics and planned projects to establish supply and demand forecasts. 

Change Management 
1. Work closely with internal team members and other stakeholders to review proposed changes and help devise post implementation verification routines and system health checks. 
2. Assist in testing changes in lower environments to ensure solution is as desired. 
3. Create and review operational change tickets with senior team members when changes to Production are needed ensuring they are complete, clear and concise. 
4. Review operational change tickets with senior team members after they are submitted by other teams to make sure they are complete, clear and concise and meet all requirements of the change standard. 
5. Communicate impacts of change to all stakeholders in a timely manner 
6. Coordinate with patch management teams as well as teams involved in infrastructure upgrades. 
7. Coordinate emergency changes per standards 

Compliance and Security 
1. Provide assistance in maintaining compliance with password resets, access reviews, remediation of Operational Incidents and MSIs. 
2. Assist in documenting remediation steps for operational incidents and/or an MSI. 
3. Engage with management, risk and compliance teams as needed. 

Job Function Descriptor: Work is generally moderate in scope and complexity. Knowledge, when gained, is applied to resolve routine and non-routine incidents, as necessary. Works under moderate supervision. 

Required qualifications to be successful in this role 
• 6-8 years of related experience 

Specialized Knowledge & Skills 
• Broad knowledge of the AWS platform, AWS Certification required. 
• Experience with Docker/Kubernetes and container orchestration. 
• Solid knowledge of AWS platform and its services - including but not limited to: AMIs, Route53, VPC, EC2, S3, IAM, AWS CLI, EBS, ELB, SQS, Cloud Watch, Cloudtrail. 
• Hands on experience in AWS provisioning of systems, securing of VPC, implementation of Security Groups, Identity and Access Management, Backups, Restore and Disaster Recovery. 
• System health monitoring and optimizing performance (CloudWatch, SolarWinds, Nagios, SumoLogic, Splunk). 
• Administration of web servers running Apache, Tomcat, IIS, Nginx. 
• Networking including DNS, certificate management, load balancing, firewalls and routing. 
• Broad experience with software-defined and traditional networking. 
• Strong understanding of Linux, including experience with server administration, monitoring, and troubleshooting. 
• Broad experience with IaaS and PaaS. 
• Broad experience building cloud infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code tools like AWS CloudFormation or Terraform. 
• Exceptional problem solving 
• Excellent communications and collaboration skills required to develop required security policies and share information with business and technology staff. 
• Project management and implementation skills to implement new technologies as necessary. 
• Must have previous operations experience in cloud environments 
• Strong written and oral communication skills. 
• Ability to lead technical discussions between stakeholders. 

Working knowledge of the following: 
• Remedy, ServiceNow or other ticketing system 
• Window O/S 
• Autosys job management for scheduling, monitoring and reporting 
• Middleware technologies such as Weblogic, JBOSS, Apache, Global Load Balancers 
• Tibco/ESB 
• Experience in support various phases of SDLC (Waterfall or Agile) 
• Demonstrable knowledge of ITIL and or Service Management 

Desired qualifications 
• Excellent technical abilities which include the following: cloud methodologies like PaaS and SaaS; programming languages like Python; orchestration systems such as Chef; IaaS servers; PowerShell scripting; and, Splunk and AppD are preferred. 
• Experience with APM technologies such as Dynatrace, App Dynamics, New Relic. Wire Data Analytics experience with tools such as Extrahop and other monitoring tools such as Catchpoint, Splunk, Moogsoft etc. is preferred. 

EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS 
Bachelor Degree or equivalent preferred 
Area of Study: Computer Science or IS/IT preferred