Cloud Systems Engineer- NY

The Senior Cloud Systems Engineer designs, engineers, automates, and continuously improves the enterprise cloud platforms and services that support Atlas Air's business-critical airline operations, digital transformation initiatives, and data and AI capabilities. This is a hands-on senior engineering role for a technologist with a proven track record of building resilient, secure, and cost-optimized cloud environments at enterprise scale.

Operating primarily in AWS, the Senior Cloud Systems Engineer owns Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD automation, and platform engineering outcomes-not day-to-day manual provisioning. The role partners with cloud architects, security, DevOps, and application teams to modernize workloads, accelerate delivery, and raise engineering standards across the organization. The engineer serves as a subject matter expert and technical escalation point for complex cloud infrastructure challenges.

Values and Behavioral Standards:

To ensure the effective communication and application of company values and behavioral standards, as stated in our company "Code of Conduct" policy, and to respond appropriately in the event of any known departure.

Major Job Accountabilities (in priority order):

Platform Engineering & Automation

• Design, build, and maintain Infrastructure as Code solutions using Terraform, including reusable modules, service templates, and enterprise guardrails.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD deployment pipelines using Git-based workflows (GitHub) to accelerate and standardize infrastructure and application delivery.
• Enable self-service infrastructure capabilities and automate operational processes to reduce toil and improve consistency and governance.
• Develop automation and tooling using Python, PowerShell, or similar languages.

Cloud Architecture & Engineering

• Engineer AWS-based infrastructure supporting production, disaster recovery, and non-production environments.
• Translate business and application requirements into secure, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solutions.
• Design and implement disaster recovery and resiliency solutions across multiple Availability Zones and AWS Regions.
• Support enterprise data and AI platforms (e.g., Databricks, Amazon Bedrock) through robust cloud infrastructure engineering.
• Participate in solution architecture and design reviews; recommend improvements and evaluate emerging cloud services and technologies.

Security & Compliance

• Engineer solutions aligned with enterprise security standards and implement cloud-native security controls.
• Maintain least-privilege access principles across IAM and enforce network and data protection controls.
• Support audit, compliance, and vulnerability remediation initiatives.

Cost Optimization (FinOps)

• Analyze cloud consumption trends and identify optimization and rightsizing opportunities.
• Implement FinOps best practices and automation to reduce waste and support budgeting and forecasting.

Operational Excellence & Support

• Act as a senior technical escalation point for complex cloud infrastructure incidents and problems.
• Implement monitoring, observability, and alerting to ensure high availability and performance.
• Keep IT management apprised of critical issues, systemic problems, and risks in a timely manner.

Collaboration, Documentation & Delivery

• Partner with application teams to modernize workloads and improve deployment velocity.
• Champion high-quality documentation of technical processes, architectures, and runbooks that yield reproducible results.
• Lead knowledge-transfer activities and mentor junior engineers to raise overall team capability.
• Deliver assigned projects on time, within scope, and within budget, adhering to change control standards and coordinating internal and vendor resources.

Required Qualifications:

• Minimum 5+ years of progressive experience in cloud, systems, or infrastructure engineering, including 3+ years designing and supporting enterprise cloud environments.
• Hands-on expertise with AWS delivering highly available, secure, and reliable services (e.g., IAM, EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, ECS/EKS).
• Proven experience implementing Infrastructure as Code with Terraform.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitHub or equivalent Git-based workflows.
• Strong scripting/automation skills (Python, PowerShell, or similar).
• Solid foundation in Linux and Windows administration, cloud networking, and IAM/security controls.
• Experience supporting production environments with high-availability and disaster recovery requirements.
• Excellent written, verbal, and presentation communication skills; demonstrated results orientation, initiative, and ownership.
• Minimum 5+ years of Microsoft Windows Server environments
• Minimum 5+ Citrix Cloud Enterprise experience

Desired Qualifications:

• BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate or Professional (or equivalent).
• HashiCorp Terraform Associate certification.
• Experience with Kubernetes/EKS, serverless, and multi-account AWS environments.
• Experience supporting data/AI platforms (Databricks, Amazon Bedrock) or large-scale cloud migrations.
• Experience in aviation, transportation, logistics, or other regulated industries.
• Experience mentoring engineers and comfort presenting to technical and non-technical audiences.

Special Demands:

This position may require travel on an as-needed basis to domestic and international company locations, data centers, and training events. The role participates in an on-call rotation and may be required to respond to major incidents outside of standard business hours.