Senior Cloud Operations Engineer 1

At PowerSchool, we are a dedicated team of innovators guided by our shared purpose of powering personalized education for students around the world. From the central office to the classroom to the home, PowerSchool supports the entire educational ecosystem as the global leader of cloud-based software for K-12 education. Our employees make it all possible, and a career with us means you’re joining a successful team committed to engaging, empowering, and improving the K-12 education experience everywhere.

Team Overview

Our Hosting team manages and supports the infrastructure of all our platforms, from hardware to software, to operating systems to PowerSchool products. This collaborative team helps meet the needs of an evolving technology and business model with a specialized focus on protecting customer data and keeping information secure.

Description

A Cloud Operations engineer is responsible for designing, deploying, managing, and optimizing cloud infrastructure and services. They ensure the availability, performance, and security of cloud-based applications and resources while monitoring and responding to incidents and issues. This role requires expertise in cloud platforms, automation, and best practices.

Your day-to-day job will consist of:

• Collaborate with developers, architects, and cloud operations teams to guide data‑modeling decisions, query design, and application patterns that impact database performance.
• Install, configure, and maintain highly available cloud‑based database environments for production workloads.
• Lead the design, implementation, and optimization of complex database architectures to ensure high availability, scalability, and consistent performance.
• Oversee database lifecycle management, including capacity planning, schema governance, version upgrades, and long‑term architectural improvements.
• Diagnose and resolve advanced performance issues using execution plans, indexing strategies, engine‑level tuning, and workload analysis.
• Perform deep root‑cause analysis for production issues and implement durable corrective and preventive actions.
• Participate in after‑hours maintenance, respond to emergencies, and support customer calls during critical incidents.
• Mentor junior team members and contribute to best‑practice development across Cloud Operations.

Minimum Qualifications

• Minimum of 5+ years of relevant and related work experience.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent, or equivalent years of relevant work experience.
• Strong proficiency with MySQL engine internals, including indexing strategies, locking behavior, transaction isolation levels, and storage engines.
• Deep understanding of backup and recovery strategies, point‑in‑time recovery, and disaster‑recovery planning in AWS.
• Proficiency with SQL scripting, schema design, and database refactoring for large‑scale systems.
• 5+ years practical experience of AWS and/or Azure equivalent technologies such as EC2, NSGs, VPC/VNETs, Load Balancers, DNS, CDN and certificate management.
• 3+ years doing server administration and cloud deployment of both Windows and Linux; including OS patching and vulnerability scanning.
• 3+ years writing Infrastructure as Code with tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, Chef, Ansible or comparable.
• Travel occasionally, up to 5-10%, for key moments such as team summits, training, conferences, etc., with increased frequency during peak periods based on business demands.
• This position is subject to company on call policies which constitutes working hours outside of the normal workday as needed.
• Additional experience may be substitute for an advanced Degree.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with AI tooling or cloud‑based AI services.

• Experience with Aurora databases, autoscaling strategies, and cost‑optimization techniques.
• AWS or relevant database certifications.

EEO Commitment

PowerSchool is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. PowerSchool is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. Our inclusive culture empowers PowerSchoolers to deliver the best results for our customers. We not only celebrate the diversity of our workforce, we celebrate the diverse ways we work. If you have a disability and need an accommodation regarding our recruiting process, please let us know by emailing accomodations@powerschool.com.