Senior Cloud Engineer

Title: Senior Cloud Engineer

Location: Chicago, IL (in-office hybrid)

Our client is seeking a Senior Cloud Engineer to design, build, and operate large-scale cloud infrastructure platforms across AWS and GCP environments. This role is infrastructure-focused and requires deep expertise in cloud architecture, Kubernetes platforms, Infrastructure as Code, distributed systems, and production reliability.

This is NOT a traditional DevOps or release engineering role. We are looking only for strong infrastructure engineering and platform architecture experience - you will have owned complex cloud environments end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate scalable, fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure platforms
• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and Ansible
• Architect and manage Kubernetes platforms across EKS and GKE environments
• Engineer resilient networking, IAM, observability, and cloud service integrations
• Build and maintain production-grade PostgreSQL and MongoDB environments
• Improve platform scalability, resilience, performance, and operational maturity
• Lead infrastructure design discussions and technical implementation efforts
• Support incident response, reliability engineering, and operational readiness
• Partner with security and engineering teams on cloud governance and platform standards
• Develop infrastructure standards, automation frameworks, and operational documentation

Required Experience

• 6+ years of hands-on cloud infrastructure engineering experience
• Deep expertise with AWS and GCP infrastructure services
• Strong Terraform and Infrastructure as Code architecture experience
• Advanced Kubernetes platform engineering experience with EKS or GKE
• Strong Linux systems and networking background
• Experience designing and operating highly available distributed systems
• Strong experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or CloudWatch
• Experience managing production databases including PostgreSQL and MongoDB
• Strong understanding of cloud IAM, security architecture, and least-privilege design
• Experience supporting large-scale production infrastructure with operational ownership

*Candidates whose background is primarily CI/CD pipeline management, release engineering, or application deployment automation without significant infrastructure architecture ownership will not be progressed for technical assessment.*