Infrastructure Engineer Lead – Cloud AI
AEP
Get a reply from this employer
Your resume and cover letter, tailored to exactly what they’re hiring for.
Benefits offered by this job
Job summary
American Electric Power (AEP) is seeking a senior cloud engineering professional to design and operate AI-oriented cloud foundations across AWS and on-premises environments. The role emphasizes secure, scalable infrastructure, cost governance, and cross-functional collaboration with cybersecurity, architecture and network teams.
The ideal candidate has extensive AWS, Kubernetes (EKS/ROSA/OpenShift), and FinOps experience, plus IaC with Terraform, CI/CD and strong security awareness.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related technical field required.
- 12 years of relevant work experience required or equivalent combination of education and experience.
- Experience in AWS including IAM, VPC, compute, storage, encryption/KMS, and account structure.
- Strong Kubernetes expertise in EKS/ROSA/OpenShift and cluster security.
- Experience with API gateways, CI/CD pipelines and IaC tooling.
Responsibilities
- Design, build and maintain AWS account structures, landing zones and reference patterns.
- Engineer compute, storage, networking foundations for AI workloads, including GPU instances.
- Enable AI platform services like Bedrock and SageMaker with private connectivity and logging.
- Develop IaC modules, templates and pipelines for rapid AI deployment within guardrails.
- Collaborate with Cybersecurity, EA and Compliance to align with security standards.
- Monitor, cost-manage and optimize GPU compute, storage and data transfer.
- Provide training and guidance to junior engineers and participate in on-call.
Skills
Education
Tools
Job description
This hands-on role builds and operates secure, scalable infrastructure for AI and machine learning workloads across AWS and approved on-premises environments. Responsibilities include cloud foundations, networking, containers, compute, identity, cost management, and observability.
The engineer partners with AI, architecture, cybersecurity, network, and application teams to deliver secure, cost-effective, production-ready infrastructure while supporting core cloud engineering services.
- Design, build and maintain the AWS account structure, landing zones, and reference patterns that host AI and machine learning workloads, leveraging AWS Control Tower, Landing Zone Accelerator, and Terraform.
- Engineer the compute, storage, and networking foundations required for AI workloads, including GPU and accelerated instance families, high-throughput storage, and data access paths to enterprise data platforms.
- Enable and operate AI platform services such as Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker, including private connectivity, model access provisioning, logging, and quota management.
- Build reusable infrastructure-as-code modules, templates and pipelines so that AI teams can deploy quickly within approved guardrails.
- Design, build and maintain on-premises AI infrastructure for edge and specialized use cases.
Support AI in disconnected or intermittently connected environments, including local compute, model distribution, patching, monitoring, backup, and recovery.
Create deployment standards, automation, runbooks, and support processes for on-premises and edge AI.
Integrate on-premises AI with enterprise identity, security, networking, monitoring, and governance where feasible.
- Partner with Cybersecurity, Enterprise Architecture and Compliance to align AI infrastructure with AEP security standards, regulatory obligations, and responsible AI guardrails.
- Review and remediate configuration drift, vulnerabilities and audit findings across the AI cloud estate; support evidence requests and control attestations.
- Contribute to onboarding and intake processes for new AI use cases, ensuring workloads are provisioned into the right accounts with the right controls from day one.
- Establish and operate FinOps practices for AI workloads, including tagging standards, showback/chargeback, budgets, anomaly detection, and forecasting.
- Analyze and optimize spend on GPU compute, inference and token consumption, storage, and data transfer; recommend commitment strategies such as Savings Plans and Reserved Instances.
- Provide cost transparency and consumption reporting to business stakeholders and technology leadership, and identify optimization opportunities before they become budget issues.
- Partner with monitoring team to create logging, alerting and dashboards for AI infrastructure and workloads.
- Define service-level objectives and operational thresholds for AI platforms, including model endpoint availability, latency, throughput, and error rates.
- Support incident response, root cause analysis and problem management for AI-related infrastructure events; drive preventive actions and automation to reduce recurrence.
- Perform standard cloud engineering functions across the AEP AWS environment including account provisioning, environment builds, platform upgrades, patching, automation and lifecycle management.
- Design, deploy and operate Kubernetes environments (Amazon EKS, ROSA/OpenShift) including cluster architecture, autoscaling, node group and GPU scheduling, ingress, service mesh, RBAC, and cluster security hardening.
- Engineer and support platform services including load balancing, traffic management, API gateways, and integration patterns across cloud, on-premises, edge, and disconnected environments.
- Apply networking fundamentals, VPC design, subnetting, routing, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPN, firewalls, TLS and certificate management to deliver secure, performant connectivity for AI and general workloads.
- Prepare cost estimates, justifications, alternative solutions and technical recommendations; produce technical documentation, runbooks and standards.
- Collaborate with Project Managers, Architects, Solution Engineers, Business Analysts and vendor partners to deliver consistent, reliable solutions that leverage AEP's technology standards, architectures and best practices.
- Adhere to and advocate for change, incident and problem management processes; participate in on-call rotation and after-hours support as required.
- Provide training, mentoring and technical work direction to other engineers on the team.
- Demonstrated hands‑on engineering experience in AWS, including IAM, VPC networking, compute, storage, encryption/KMS, and account/organization structure.
- Strong Kubernetes expertise including cluster design, operations, troubleshooting and security in EKS, ROSA or OpenShift.
- Solid networking fundamentals, including routing, DNS, load balancing, traffic management, firewalls, hybrid connectivity, and network design for disconnected or intermittently connected environments.
- Experience with API gateways, integration patterns, and exposing and securing services across environments.
- Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code and automation (Terraform required; Ansible, Python or PowerShell preferred) and CI/CD pipelines.
- Working knowledge of cloud security principles, identity and access management, and compliance requirements.
- Experience implementing monitoring and cost management for cloud environments, with the ability to establish local monitoring, logging, patching, backup, and recovery processes for on-premises and disconnected environments.
- Strong analytical, troubleshooting and problem‑solving skills, with the ability to work independently on complex assignments.
- Effective written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to present technical recommendations clearly to management and non‑technical stakeholders.
- Architecture experience including designing end-to-end cloud solutions and influencing platform direction is highly desirable.
- Direct experience building or operating AI/ML or GenAI workloads across cloud or on‑premises infrastructure (Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, vector databases, retrieval‑augmented generation patterns, GPU‑based training or inference, edge AI, or disconnected environments).
- Experience with FinOps tooling and practices for high‑variability workloads.
- Experience in a regulated industry (utility, energy, financial services) or with FedRAMP/GovCloud environments.
- Familiarity with multi‑cloud environments (Azure, OCI, GCP) and enterprise data platforms such as Snowflake.
- Certifications: AWS Solutions Architect – Associate or Professional; AWS Certified Machine Learning; Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).
- Adhere to policies, procedures, standards, codes and regulations relevant to assignments.
- Demonstrate in‑depth knowledge of AEP infrastructure, environment and components to enable efficient, comprehensive responses to projects and problems.
- Participate in on‑call rotation, after‑hours maintenance windows, and storm/emergency response support as required.
Education requirements are listed below:
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related technical field is required.
- 12 years of relevant work experience required. An equivalent combination of education and related experience may be considered.
- Base salary
- Annual bonus
- Long‑term incentive
- 401(k) match
- AEP Pension
- Comprehensive benefits package designed to support and enhance the overall well‑being of employees.
At AEP, we’re more than just an energy company — we’re a team of dedicated professionals committed to delivering safe, reliable, and innovative energy solutions. Guided by our mission to put the customer first, we strive to exceed expectations by listening, responding, and continuously improving the way we serve our communities. If you're passionate about making a meaningful impact and being part of a forward-thinking organization, this is the company for you!
$136,539.00 - $177,503.00
The Physical Demand Level for this job is: S – Sedentary Work: Exerting up to 10 pounds of force occasionally (Occasionally: activity or condition exists up to 1/3 of the time) and/or a negligible amount of force frequently. (Frequently: activity or condition exists from 1/3 to 2/3 of the time) to lift, carry, push, pull or otherwise move objects, including the human body. Sedentary work involves sitting most of the time but may involve walking or standing for brief periods of time. Jobs are sedentary if walking and standing are required only occasionally, and all other sedentary criteria are met.
It is hereby reaffirmed that it is the policy of American Electric Power (AEP) to provide Equal Employment Opportunity in all respects of the employer-employee relationship including recruiting, hiring, upgrading and promotion, conditions and privileges of employment, company sponsored training programs, educational assistance, social and recreational programs, compensation, benefits, transfers, discipline, layoffs and termination of employment to all employees and applicants without discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age, veteran or military status, disability, genetic information, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law. When required by law, we might record certain information or applicants for employment may be invited to voluntarily disclose protected characteristics.
Responsible for the operational support, security, and lifecycle management of network infrastructure supporting Cook Nuclear operations. This role focuses on incident response, task execution, vulnerability remediation, and infrastructure refresh activities, ensuring compliance with NERC CIP standards and regulatory requirements.
Part of a larger team delivering high quality technology solutions to the business. Design, develop and install software solutions. Build high‑quality, innovative and fully performing software in compliance with internal architecture, development & design standards & best practices. Design, modify, develop, write, implement and troubleshoot software programming applications. Support and/or install software applications. Participate in the testing process through test review and analysis, test witnessing and certification of software. Works within a Waterfall or Agile methodology/framework based team. Collaborates heavily with Project Management, Business Analyst and Infrastructure Job Families.
Part of a larger team delivering enterprise infrastructure solutions that enable business operations, technology modernization, and operational excellence. Responsible for translating business, operational, and technical requirements into scalable infrastructure architectures spanning server platforms, operating systems, storage, databases, identity services, automation, and core enterprise platforms. Focuses on developing and governing infrastructure standards, architecture patterns, roadmaps, and technology ecosystems to ensure solutions are secure, resilient, supportable, and aligned with strategic objectives. Provides architectural leadership across infrastructure domains while driving consistency, modernization, and operational efficiency.Please note: We’re looking for someone with strong experience as an Architect.
AEP offers generous time off, competitive pay, and educational opportunities to help employees advance their careers.
Our culture is purpose-driven and team-oriented: we combine innovation with a customer‑first focus to deliver reliable energy and brighter futures.
'/%3e%3cpath%20d='M101.744%2012.4726L102.894%2016.1947L99.0021%2013.2201L101.744%2012.4726ZM105.3%208.40937H100.488L99.0026%203.59473L97.5116%208.41047L92.7%208.40385L96.5965%2011.3834L95.1055%2016.1942L99.0021%2013.2196L101.408%2011.3834L105.3%208.40992V8.40937Z'%20fill='white'/%3e%3cdefs%3e%3clinearGradient%20id='paint0_linear_5593_1381'%20x1='90'%20y1='9.44471'%20x2='99'%20y2='9.44471'%20gradientUnits='userSpaceOnUse'%3e%3cstop%20stop-color='%2300AD70'/%3e%3cstop%20offset='0.998594'%20stop-color='%2300B67A'/%3e%3cstop%20offset='1'%20stop-color='%23DCDCE6'/%3e%3c/linearGradient%3e%3c/defs%3e%3c/svg%3e){kind=small}
