Senior Associate, Technology Operations (cloud Operations)

Senior Associate, Technology Operations (Cloud Operations)

The Senior Associate, Technology Operations (Cloud Operations) is a technical lead role responsible for technically guiding a team of cloud engineers while remaining deeply hands-on with AWS infrastructure, operations, and reliability engineering. This role sits at the intersection of cloud operations, platform engineering, and incident management, ensuring highly available, secure, and performant AWS environments supporting business-critical applications.

Western Union powers your pursuit. The ideal candidate combines strong AWS technical expertise, operational discipline, and people leadership, with the ability to lead through incidents, drive automation, and continuously improve cloud resilience and efficiency.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Engineering

• Act as a hands-on technical leader, actively designing, reviewing, and troubleshooting AWS architectures and operational workflows
• Lead and contribute to the management of production AWS environments supporting Tier-1 / Tier-0 workloads
• Drive cloud reliability, resiliency, and availability improvements, including multi-AZ and multi-region designs
• Review and guide implementation of infrastructure as code (IaC) using tools such as CloudFormation and/or Terraform
• Lead initiatives around automation, self-healing, and operational tooling using Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge, and scripting (Python/Bash)
• Ensure strong security and compliance posture, including IAM, network segmentation, encryption, and logging

Cloud Operations & Incident Management

• Serve as an escalation point during P1 / P2 incidents, providing technical direction and hands-on remediation
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and post-incident reviews, driving corrective and preventive actions
• Partner with application, security, and platform teams to resolve complex, cross-service issues
• Ensure operational readiness through runbooks, SOPs, and DR procedures
• Participate in and lead disaster recovery exercises, failover/failback testing, and resilience drills

Team Management & Mentorship

• Manage and mentor a team of AWS cloud engineers, providing technical guidance, coaching, and performance feedback
• Foster a culture of operational excellence, ownership, and continuous learning
• Assist with onboarding, skills development, and technical upskilling of team members
• Support staffing, capacity planning, and on-call rotations to ensure 24x7 operational coverage

Platform & Service Ownership

• Own AWS platform components such as:
  • EC2, Auto Scaling, ALB/NLB
  • VPC, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, Route 53
  • ECS/EKS (where applicable)
  • RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache
  • S3, EFS, Backup, and FSX
• Drive cost optimization initiatives using AWS Cost Explorer, Savings Plans, and right-sizing strategies
• Partner with FinOps, Security, and Architecture teams to align cloud platforms with enterprise standards

Observability & Performance

• Ensure strong monitoring, alerting, and observability using CloudWatch, third-party APM tools, and custom dashboards
• Lead performance and capacity planning discussions, identifying bottlenecks and scaling risks Define and track SLOs, SLIs, and operational KPIs

Role Requirements

Technical Skills

• 3+ years of hands-on experience with AWS cloud infrastructure
• Strong expertise in core AWS services: EC2, VPC, IAM, ELB, Auto Scaling, S3, RDS
• Experience with Linux-based systems (Amazon Linux, RHEL, Ubuntu)
• Strong understanding of networking concepts (subnets, routing, DNS, load balancing, firewalls)
• Experience with automation and scripting (Python, Bash, or similar)
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices
• Experience operating high-availability, production systems

Leadership & Operational Skills

• 2+ years of experience leading or mentoring technical teams
• Proven experience handling major production incidents and complex troubleshooting
• Strong documentation and communication skills
• Ability to balance people management with hands-on technical contribution

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, SysOps, or DevOps Engineer)
• Experience with ECS, EKS, or Kubernetes
• Experience with Terraform or large-scale CloudFormation deployments
• Familiarity with security tooling, vulnerability management, and audit requirements
• Experience with disaster recovery automation and multi-region architectures
• Exposure to FinOps practices and cloud cost governance

Key Success Indicators

• Reduced incident frequency and MTTR
• Improved automation and operational maturity
• Increased platform resiliency and DR readiness
• High team engagement, skill growth, and retention
• Strong alignment with security, compliance, and architecture standards

30 / 60 / 90 Day Expectations

First 30 Days – Learn, Stabilize, and Integrate

Focus: Environment understanding, team integration, and operational readiness

Technical & Platform

• Gain deep familiarity with the organization's AWS landscape, including:
  • Account structure, landing zones, and network topology
  • Core Tier-1 / Tier-0 platforms and dependencies
  • Existing IaC, automation, and operational tooling
• Review current architecture standards, security baselines, and operational runbooks
• Access and understand monitoring, alerting, and observability dashboards
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident bridges to understand operational patterns

Operational & Process

• Review recent P1/P2 incidents, RCAs, and corrective actions
• Understand DR strategies, RTO/RPO targets, and current failover procedures
• Become familiar with change management, release processes, and escalation paths

People & Leadership

• Establish strong working relationships with team members and key stakeholders
• Understand individual team strengths, skill gaps, and ownership areas
• Set expectations around operational discipline, documentation, and incident response

Success Indicators

• Able to independently navigate AWS environments and tooling
• Trusted participant in incident response and technical discussions
• Clear understanding of platform risks and improvement opportunities

60 Days – Execute, Improve, and Lead

Focus: Hands-on contribution, operational improvements, and team leadership

Technical & Platform

• Take ownership of one or more critical AWS platform components or services
• Actively lead troubleshooting and remediation for production issues
• Identify and implement quick-win improvements in:
  • Monitoring and alerting quality
  • Automation and manual toil reduction
  • Security gaps or configuration inconsistencies
• Review and improve existing IaC and deployment pipelines

Operational & Resiliency

• Lead at least one RCA from