[Hiring] Cloud Network Engineer @American Public Education, Inc. (APEI)

Role Description

The Cloud Network Engineer designs, implements, operates, and improves enterprise network and cloud infrastructure that supports the organization’s technology and business objectives. This role delivers secure, scalable, resilient, and cost-conscious solutions across public cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments; automates infrastructure deployment and configuration; monitors availability and performance; and resolves complex infrastructure incidents in partnership with security, application, and operations teams.

• Design, implement, administer, and support enterprise network and cloud infrastructure across public cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
• Build and maintain cloud services including compute, storage, virtual networking, DNS, identity integration, load balancing, private connectivity, and shared platform components.
• Engineer network solutions including routing, switching, firewalls, virtual networks or VPCs, peering, VPN connectivity, private endpoints, segmentation, and cloud-to-datacenter connectivity.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates, CloudFormation, or equivalent tools for repeatable, version-controlled, and auditable deployments.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure deployment and configuration changes using Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or comparable platforms.
• Create automation scripts and workflows that reduce manual effort, improve consistency, enforce standards, and increase operational efficiency.
• Implement cloud and network security controls with security teams, including least-privilege access, RBAC, privileged access, segmentation, secrets management, encryption, and policy enforcement.
• Apply established architecture patterns, technical standards, naming and tagging conventions, configuration baselines, and governance requirements.
• Design and operate infrastructure for high availability, fault tolerance, scalability, disaster recovery, and business continuity.
• Monitor infrastructure health, utilization, performance, availability, capacity, and security; configure dashboards and alerts; and proactively identify risks or degradation.
• Troubleshoot complex network, cloud, connectivity, DNS, performance, access, and availability issues; provide escalation support and participate in major incident response and root cause analysis.
• Perform capacity planning, resource rightsizing, and cost analysis; recommend improvements that balance performance, resilience, operational needs, and cloud spend.
• Support cloud migrations, modernization, platform upgrades, network changes, integrations, and lifecycle initiatives through design, testing, implementation, validation, documentation, and operational handoff.
• Create and maintain architecture diagrams, implementation plans, runbooks, configuration standards, support procedures, and technical decision records.
• Collaborate with application development, security, identity, service management, vendors, and business teams to translate requirements into secure, supportable infrastructure solutions.
• Participate in design and change reviews, identify technical and operational risks, and provide clear recommendations to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Share technical knowledge and provide guidance to administrators and support teams to promote consistent network and cloud engineering practices.

Qualifications

• Five or more years of progressively responsible network, cloud, systems, or infrastructure experience, including hands-on engineering responsibilities in an enterprise environment.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major public cloud platform, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience designing, implementing, and troubleshooting enterprise networking, including routing, switching, DNS, firewalls, load balancing, VPNs, segmentation, and hybrid cloud connectivity.
• Working proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates, CloudFormation, or equivalent technologies, along with Git-based source control practices.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or a comparable platform for infrastructure deployment and automation.
• Experience implementing cloud identity and security controls, including IAM or Microsoft Entra ID integration, RBAC, privileged access, secrets management, policy enforcement, and encryption.
• Experience with infrastructure monitoring, observability, logging, dashboarding, and alerting using native cloud or enterprise monitoring platforms.
• Working knowledge of high availability, fault tolerance, backup, disaster recovery, scalability, capacity planning, and business continuity concepts.
• Experience troubleshooting complex production infrastructure issues and participating in incident, problem, change, and root cause management processes.
• Ability to evaluate resource utilization and cloud costs and recommend rightsizing, tagging, reserved capacity, or other optimization opportunities.
• Familiarity with cloud governance, security baselines, compliance requirements, and audit evidence in an enterprise environment.
• Working knowledge of containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, AKS, or EKS is preferred.
• Ability to translate technical and business requirements into practical designs, implementation plans, operational documentation, and support models.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, collaboration, documentation, and written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to participate in an on-call rotation and support planned infrastructure changes outside normal business hours when required.

Education/Certifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, management information systems, or a related field preferred; equivalent education and relevant experience considered.
• Relevant cloud, networking, infrastructure-as-code, security, or IT service management certifications are preferred, such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Cisco, HashiCorp Terraform, Kubernetes, CompTIA, or ITIL certifications.

Competencies

• Collaborates: Builds and maintains effective partnerships with team members and stakeholders, working collaboratively to achieve shared goals and resolve challenges effectively.
• Communicates Effectively: Delivers clear, concise, and tailored communications through various modes (e.g., written, verbal, and visual) to meet the unique needs of diverse audiences.
• Customer Focus: Cultivates strong relationships with internal and external customers by actively listening to their needs and providing timely, customer-centric solutions.
• Demonstrates Self-Awareness: Regularly seeks and incorporates feedback from peers, leaders, and stakeholders to understand and address personal strengths and areas for growth.
• Ensures Accountability: Consistently meets deadlines and delivers on commitments, ensuring work quality and aligning with organizational standards.
• Innovation & Improvement: Encourages forward-thinking solutions, process improvements, and a culture of learning to enhance efficiency and team effectiveness.