R&D Cloud Architect & Distributed Systems Engineer

University of Texas; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 104,000 - 174,000; Full time

Job summary

University of Texas’s Applied Research Laboratories is seeking an R&D Cloud Engineering Scientist to design, deploy, and maintain scalable cloud infrastructure supporting research and engineering applications. You will contribute to cloud architecture, implement infrastructure as code, and build CI/CD pipelines across environments.

Ideal candidates have 3+ years in cloud engineering, hands-on experience with AWS/Azure/GCP, Kubernetes, and security-focused design, with strong communication skills

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer or information science, or other applied sciences.
• Three years of experience in cloud engineering.
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code methodologies.
• Experience with containerization and container orchestration.
• Knowledge of networking concepts.
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools and practices.
• Understanding of distributed systems principles.
• Experience designing for scalability, high availability, security, and fault tolerance.
• Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting abilities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD 8140 compliant security certification within six months of employment.

Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Design & Architecture: Contribute to cloud architecture solutions for applications across multiple environments.
• Design scalable, highly available, secure, and fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• Define networking, compute, storage, and security requirements and patterns.
• Make architectural tradeoffs to manage cloud costs.
• Evaluate and recommend cloud services.
• Create and maintain architecture diagrams and design documentation.
• Implementation & Deployment: Implement infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code.
• Deploy and configure cloud resources including compute, storage, networking, and databases.
• Set up multi-region and multi-availability zone deployments.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure changes.
• Operations & Reliability: Monitor infrastructure health, performance, and cost.
• Implement robust monitoring, alerting, and logging solutions.
• Contribute to disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
• Support management of lifecycle of cloud costs.
• Optimize resource utilization and cloud costs.
• Security & Compliance: Support efforts to implement IAM best practices, define network security configuration, ensure data encryption at rest and in transit, compliance audits, and conduct periodic security reviews.
• Collaboration & Documentation: Partner with development teams to support application requirements.
• Create and maintain runbooks, documentation, and operational procedures.
• Provide guidance and mentorship on cloud best practices.

Skills

Cloud engineering

Infrastructure as Code

Containerization / Orchestration

Networking concepts

CI/CD practices

Distributed systems

Problem-solving

Communication skills

Security best practices

DoD 8140 compliance

Education

Bachelor's degree in engineering or related field

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Kubernetes

GitLab CI

Jenkins

CloudWatch / Datadog

Job description

University of Texas’s Applied Research Laboratories is seeking an R&D Cloud Engineering Scientist to design, deploy, and maintain scalable cloud infrastructure supporting research and engineering applications. You will contribute to cloud architecture, implement infrastructure as code, and build CI/CD pipelines across environments.

Ideal candidates have 3+ years in cloud engineering, hands-on experience with AWS/Azure/GCP, Kubernetes, and security-focused design, with strong communication skills