About UMass Amherst
The flagship of the Commonwealth, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a nationally ranked public land-grant research university that seeks to expand educational access, fuel innovation and creativity, and share and use its knowledge for the common good. Founded in 1863, UMass Amherst sits on nearly 1,450-acres in scenic Western Massachusetts and boasts state-of-the-art facilities for teaching, research, scholarship, and creative activity. The institution advances a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community where everyone feels connected and valued—and thrives, and offers a full range of undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees across 10 schools and colleges, and 100 undergraduate majors. We believe every member of our university community can contribute to our ongoing success by striving for the highest level of excellence as we seek breakthrough solutions to mounting environmental, social, economic, and technological challenges in our world.
Job Summary
The Cloud Automation Engineer will implement, monitor, and continually improve procedures and resource allocations to ensure professional, high quality technology support and services to the UMass Amherst Campus including its executives, faculty, staff, and administrators. Provide support and maintenance of cloud computing systems, both on-premises and with third parties, including assessing systems services to identify potential weakness and problems and refining deployment, backup, and integration scripts.
Essential Functions
- Works on multiple projects to research, propose and implement strategies in the automation, migration and consolidation of complex distributed systems with both private and public on-premises and cloud infrastructures. This may entail converting or migrating physical servers to virtual machines on-premises or to cloud providers (e.g. Azure, AWS) as well as moving virtualized instances located on-premises into services provided by cloud vendors.
- Develops, implements, and manages containerized on-prem and cloud infrastructure solutions using Docker and Kubernetes, ensuring high availability, scalability, and security of applications deployed across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
- Collaborates with cross-functional teams to integrate container orchestration into CI/CD pipelines and optimize deployment workflows by leveraging build and orchestration tools such as Jenkins and Terraform, enabling developers to seamlessly move code through an industry-standard, automated pipeline.
- Analyzes, monitors, and keeps systems current with changing technologies for the campus community.
- Automates the provisioning, configuration, and maintaining new and existing software/services for the campus community.
- Assists in the management of multiple database instances in support of various cloud applications.
- Monitors system and code performance and tune/adjust system resources to maintain efficient and equitable use of managed resources by the campus community. Implements changes in multiple environments from test or development to staging to production which may include automating various tasks in multiple environments.
- Responds to alerts and customer reported issues. Escalate or resolve problems as needed exercising independent judgement and within established support practices.
- Develops tools for automation of tasks and integration of other central IT services.
- Participates in the planning of both short and long-term cloud goals and directions for UMass IT.
- Understands responsibilities with respect to conflicts of interest and behaves in ways consistent both with law and with university policy.
- Contributes toward creating a positive and respectful workplace defined by personal and professional competence, integrity, and collaboration.
- Understands and contributes to implementation of departmental and institutional goals for achieving non-discrimination and creating a respectful, inclusive environment that is supportive of diversity.
- Uses access to sensitive and/or not yet public university related information only in the performance of the responsibilities of position and exercises care to prevent unnecessary disclosure to others.
Other Functions
- Performs related duties as assigned or required to meet Department, Executive Area/Division, and University goals and objectives.
- Provide consulting to IT and other campus staff on matters related to system provisioning and centralized maintenance and monitoring.
- Perform miscellaneous related duties as required.
Minimum Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Education, Experience, Certifications, Licensure)
- Bachelor’s degree with 5 (five) years of related professional or Associate’s degree with 7 (seven) years related professional experience.
- 3 (three) years providing Cloud orchestration and coding in a large complex environment.
- Knowledge and experience with system scripting using technologies such as Python and Bash.
- Knowledge and experience working with virtualization environments and tools such as VMWare.
- Experience with automation products, such as Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible or GIT.
- Knowledge and experience with industry standard cloud best-practices as they relate to deployment, provisioning, and pipelining.
- Experience in UNIX/Linux including TCP/IP and Basic Networking
- Excellent analytical and organizational skills to plan, recommend, implement, and monitor effective and efficient processes and to identify problems and implement solutions.
- Good communication and people skills, participation in on-call rotation, strong analytical skills, organized, responsive, and thorough.
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
- Ability to work independently with minimal guidance.
Preferred Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Education, Experience, Certifications, Licensure)
- Experience working in a large complex educational environment a plus.
- Experience and certification with AWS or Azure.
- Experience with database management systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server.
- Experience with centralized automated configuration management and provisioning solutions for Linux systems such as RedHat Satellite, Puppet or Ansible.
- Experience working in a team-based environment and a proven history of implementing cross-departmental initiatives.
Physical Demands/Working Conditions
Typical Office Environment Activity.
Work Schedule
- Monday – Friday 37.5 hours a week.
- Required to work some nights and some weekends.
- Participate in off-hours on-call rotation.
- This position has the opportunity for a hybrid work schedule, which is defined by the University as an arrangement where an employee’s work is regularly performed at a location other than the campus workspace for a portion of the week. As this position falls within the Professional Staff Union, it is subject to the terms and conditions of the Professional Staff Union collective bargaining agreement.
- This position has the opportunity for a remote work schedule, which is defined by the University as an arrangement where the employee’s work location is to work from a site other than the UMass Amherst campus. As this position falls within the Professional Staff Union, it is subject to the terms and conditions of the Professional Staff Union collective bargaining agreement.
Salary Information
Level 30
PSU Hiring Ranges
Special Instructions to Applicants
Along with the application, please submit a resume and cover letter. References will be checked at the finalist stage, please be prepared to provide contact information for three (3) professional references.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst welcomes all qualified applicants and complies with all state and federal anti-discrimination laws.