Cloud Platform and Data Engineer

About

The Cloud Platform and Data Engineer designs, builds, and operates cloud data infrastructure as a product—delivering secure, reliable, and scalable database services through automation and self-service. This role blends cloud engineering (Infrastructure-as-Code, networking, observability, and reliability engineering) with hands-on DBA responsibilities to ensure cloud workloads and database platforms meet performance, availability, security, and compliance requirements. The engineer partners with infrastructure, application, data, and security teams to standardize patterns, reduce operational toil, and enable teams to ship changes safely across development, test, and production environments.

Key technologies: Azure (primary) and AWS cloud platforms, Azure SQL (SQL Database/Managed Instance), SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB

Responsibilities

• Own the cloud platform lifecycle in Azure and database lifecycle in hybrid environments (provisioning, configuration, upgrades, patching, and decommissioning) with supporting capabilities in AWS.
• Design, deploy, and operate Azure-based cloud infrastructure aligned with established architectures and governance standards.
• Own production workloads and services, implement Infrastructure as Code and automation, optimize performance and cost, and serve as an escalation point for complex operational issues.
• Build and maintain cloud-based data pipelines supporting ingestion, transformation, and delivery of data for analytics and operational use cases.
• Optimize pipelines for reliability and performance, and collaborate with application and analytics teams to meet data requirements.
• Perform and coordinate core DBA operations: maintenance windows, patching/updates, configuration management, and scheduling/ownership of operational jobs.
• Administer cloud and database platform access controls, assist with audits, and implement standardized onboarding/offboarding processes.
• Implement observability for database services using tools such as Azure Monitor/Log Analytics and AWS CloudWatch.
• Proactively manage health, capacity, and performance.
• Contribute to financial initiatives for cloud and database platforms including planning and managing storage, compute, licensing/cost consumption.
• Optimize for performance and cloud spend using Azure Cost Management and AWS cost tools, tagging, and chargeback/showback practices.
• Tune managed and self-hosted databases to meet latency and throughput targets.
• Execute and automate database maintenance practices and establish performance baselines.
• Diagnose and remediate bottlenecks across the stack using data-driven analysis and load testing.
• Plan and execute database upgrades and migrations with minimal downtime and clear rollback strategies.
• Design scalable patterns for OLTP and analytics workloads including read replicas, caching, and right-sized tiers.
• Implement automated backup, restore, and point-in-time recovery strategies aligned to RPO/RTO objectives.
• Own restore execution for incidents and user requests and continuously improve restore speed and reliability.
• Regularly test restores and disaster recovery runbooks; perform game days and document outcomes.
• Engineer multi-region and cross-zone resiliency patterns balancing availability, consistency, and cost.
• Own cloud and database platform security posture including identity/access, network controls, secrets management, and least-privilege role design.
• Implement and operate governance controls such as auditing, data classification, retention, and masking/tokenization.
• Partner with security to manage vulnerability remediation, configuration baselines, and continuous compliance reporting across Azure and AWS.
• Ensure vendor licensing, data retention, and governance requirements are met across managed and self-hosted database services.
• Define and maintain reference architectures, standards, and guardrails for database services and data infrastructure.
• Build self-service provisioning workflows and templates using Infrastructure-as-Code for database services and supporting infrastructure.
• Partner with application and data engineering teams on schema changes, migration strategies, and reliable release patterns.
• Review schema/query changes for operational readiness and advise teams on best practices.
• Automate provisioning, patching, backups, scaling, and routine maintenance using scripts, IaC, and workflow orchestration.
• Continuously improve platform reliability and developer experience by reducing manual effort, standardizing patterns, and measuring operational toil.
• Serve as the escalation point for cloud and database platform incidents; lead triage, root cause analysis, and corrective actions.
• Partner with infrastructure, application, data, and security teams to deliver integrated solutions.
• Contribute to standards, documentation, and runbooks; mentor junior engineers; provide technical input into platform improvements and roadmap discussions.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in cloud/platform engineering, SRE, or database/data infrastructure engineering roles.
• Strong understanding of database platform fundamentals including availability, consistency, replication, backups, security, and performance.
• Experience operating managed database services in cloud environments especially Azure SQL Database/Managed Instance with supporting experience in AWS.
• Strong SQL skills including T-SQL and familiarity with Oracle PL/SQL and MongoDB query patterns.
• Experience supporting safe change management including migrations, versioning, and deployment strategies.
• Strong operational discipline including monitoring/alerting, incident response, postmortems, and continuous improvement.
• Experience provisioning infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code and automation such as Terraform, Bicep/ARM, CloudFormation.
• Working knowledge of database-specific HA/DR tooling and cloud-native equivalents.
• Knowledge of cloud and database security best practices including IAM, network segmentation, encryption, and secrets management.
• Experience with cloud networking patterns for data services and connectivity to on-premises environments.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration including Docker and Kubernetes supporting stateful workloads.
• Experience with automation and DevOps practices including CI/CD, GitOps, testing, and release orchestration.
• Excellent attention to detail and commitment to data integrity.
• Strong problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.
• Ability to multitask and manage priorities in a dynamic environment.
• Effective communication skills with ability to simplify complex concepts.
• Collaborative mindset and ability to work across multiple IT disciplines.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field or equivalent experience.
• At least 5 years in a similar role, preferably in a high-tech manufacturing environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong scripting and automation skills including Python, PowerShell, Bash and configuration management such as Ansible.
• Experience with platform engineering practices including self-service, golden paths, service catalogs, and internal developer platforms.
• Experience with data infrastructure components beyond databases such as messaging/streaming, caching, data integration.