Staff Cloud Engineer - Contract

Early Warning (Zelle); Scottsdale (AZ); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Early Warning (Zelle) in Scottsdale, AZ is seeking a senior Cloud Architect to lead the design, development, and deployment of complex cloud-based solutions.

You will partner with product and engineering teams to define technical strategy, drive infrastructure-as-code, and ensure security and scalability across distributed services. This role offers a hybrid work model across our U.S. offices and requires deep hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field.
• Eight or more years of relevant related experience.
• Seven or more years of experience in distributed systems, SaaS, cloud solutions, microservices.
• Hands-on Docker experience.
• Two or more years of front-end development with modern frameworks (Angular/React).
• Six or more years of work experience with Java/Spring. Proficiency in Maven/Gradle.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and work in a collaborative team environment.
• Experience designing/developing scalable systems and event-driven architectures.

Responsibilities

• Develop and drive technical architecture for large-scale projects.
• Lead design, prototyping, and implementation for product needs.
• Collaborate with product and engineering to build new features.
• Own features and maintain long-term health of systems.
• Guide cross-functional teams and present rationale to stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers and improve engineering standards and tooling.
• Support risk management and data security.

Skills

Cloud architecture

Distributed systems

Java/Spring

Event-driven design

Front-end frameworks

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Ansible

AWS

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

At Early Warning, we've powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle, Paze, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Overall Purpose

This position is an important role in the development, test, and deployment of complex solutions.

Essential Functions

• Build technical strategy for broad or complex requirements with insightful and forward-looking approaches that go beyond the direct team and solve large open-ended problems.
• Participate in the strategic development of methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria for projects and programs.
• Drive all aspects of technical architecture, design, prototyping and implementation in support of both product needs as well as overall technology strategy.
• Provide leadership and technical expertise in support of building a technical plan and backlog of stories, and then follow through on execution of design and build process through to production delivery.
• Guide a broad functional area and lead efforts through the functional team members along with the team's overall planning.
• Represent engineering in cross-functional team sessions and able to present sound and thoughtful arguments to persuade others. Adapts to the situation and can draw from a range of strategies to influence people in a way that results in agreement or behavior change.
• Collaborate and partner with product managers, designers, and other engineering groups to conceptualize and build new features and create product descriptions.
• Actively own features or systems and define their long-term health, while also improving the health of surrounding systems.
• Assist support and operations teams in identifying and quickly resolving production issues.
• Develop and implement tests for ensuring the quality, performance, and scalability of our application.
• Actively seek out ways to improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes.
• Supporting the company's commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.

For Cloud Focus Only

• Lead infrastructure-as-code projects, designing APIs and building tools to be used by engineering teams for reliable and repeatable cloud deployments
• Implement abstractions to simplify the complexities of cloud providers (AWS), open-source technologies (Kubernetes), and internal EWS infrastructure
• Obsess about the usability of the systems you build, allowing engineers to have an intuitive and predictable experience working with infrastructure at scale
• Troubleshooting complex infrastructure problems, often spanning multiple layers of the stack and requires working with multiple teams
• Experience designing cloud infrastructure for robustness, security, and observability
• Expertise in infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and continuous deployment pipelines
• Expertise in AWS foundations including compute, networking, storage, observability and security. Experience in automating AWS services using Terraform and Ansible.
• Experience in highly scalable distributed datacenter or cloud computer systems (AWS, Azure, VM)
• Strong knowledge of AWS services (EC2, IAM, ELB, Route53, S3, Lambda, Cloud Formation, DynamoDB)
• Experience architecting Kubernetes based systems
• Container orchestration - Kubernetes, TKGi, EKS, ECS
• Proficient with using and debugging networks, DNS, HTTP, TLS, load-balancing, build systems, Linux, and Docker
• Experience in building CI/CD pipelines
• Experience building and scaling Workflow pipelines
• Experience in data center operations, monitoring, alerting and notifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Education and/or experience typically obtained through a Bachelor's degree in computer science or related technical field.
• Eight or more years of relevant related experience
• Seven or more years of experience in the development of distributed systems, SaaS, cloud solutions, micro services.
• Hands-on Docker experience.
• Two or more years of experience in the development of front-end solutions. Hands-on familiarity with modern frameworks (Angular/React)
• Six or more years of work experience with Java/Spring. Proficiency in Maven/Gradle.
• Demonstrated experience in delivering business-critical systems to the market.
• Ability to influence and work in a collaborative team environment.
• Experience designing/developing scalable systems.
• Experience with event-driven architecture and messaging frameworks (Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ, et