Int. Cloud Administrator to support operations and provide end‑to‑end support of cloud analytics platforms for a large insurance client - 1593

Role Title: Cloud Administrator IV

Duration: 6 months

Extension/Conversion: Very high likelihood of a 6‑month extension; potential for FTE conversion

Location: Waterloo; Hybrid - on-site once per month for town halls and monthly team events (subject to change)

Work Hours: Monday-Friday; flexible start times (8-4, 8:30-4:30, or 9-5). Must start no later than 9 a.m.

*Must be eligible for Reliability Status Clearance (must have been in Canada for last 5 years and not traveled for a period longer than 6 months at a time)

Team Overview

The role sits within the Cloud Analytics Infrastructure (CAI) Operations team, which supports the analytics infrastructure for the Enterprise Data Lake (EDL) in Canada. The team works closely with AWS Operations and is part of a broader group where two legacy teams (legacy data warehouse + AWS/cloud tooling) are merging. This is not a development role-it is operations-focused, providing end‑to‑end support, maintenance, and optimization of cloud analytics platforms.

Key Business Context

• The team manages ingestion and data operations across EMR, Glue, and S3.
• EMR is being decommissioned over the next year. The successful candidate will help support the transition to Snowflake pipelines.
• They need someone senior who can understand the technical landscape, take ownership, and help lead the transition effort.
• Strong working knowledge of ETL, data ingestion, data sets, and cloud infrastructure is required.
• There is ongoing work to support internal teams using the EDL and to optimize cost efficiency (e.g., Glue optimizations, storage patterns).

Must Have Skills:

1. AWS Services:

• EMR (ingestion workloads, operational health, performance tuning, upgrade readiness)
• Glue (connections, configurations, Glue Catalog, Data Mesh integration)
• S3 (data‑lake storage patterns, logging/auditing, bucket‑level controls)
• Additional AWS experience: EC2, Lambda, Spark, CloudFormation, SQS, SNS

2. Data Lake & EDL Operations:

• Strong understanding of data‑lake architectures and ingestion pipelines
• Knowledge of Zone 2/Curated vs. Zone 3/Derived datasets
• Experience operating in controlled, integrity‑focused data environments
• Glue Catalog & Hive Metastore familiarity
• Data Mesh architecture knowledge

3. Snowflake & Iceberg:

• Support transition from EMR to Snowflake pipelines

4. Programming & Scripting

• Python (primary language)
• Bash/Shell scripting
• SQL

5. IAM, Security & Controlled Execution

• Working knowledge of IAM concepts, especially as they relate to Glue service roles
• Comfort performing schema‑impacting changes and privileged operations
• Understanding of data governance, security controls, and cloud‑risk remediation

6. Metrics, Cost Optimization & Automation

• Ability to analyze usage, cost, performance, and identify optimization opportunities
• Cost‑efficiency awareness across Glue, S3, and EMR workloads

7. Systems & Platform Knowledge

• Linux system management
• Understanding of ETL/ELT concepts, ingestion patterns, and dataset lifecycle.

Nice‑to‑Have

1. DevOps & automation (CI/CD, scripting)
2. Cost optimization project experience
3. Chatbot/NLP tool development
4. Ansible, Terraform
5. Confluence, JIRA Cloud, ServiceNow
6. Network services, Active Directory, IAM roles, Linux user/group admin
7. ETL/ELT pipeline experience

Additional Competencies:

• Strong debugging/problem‑solving
• Monitoring & alerting experience
• Understanding of data governance & security
• Excellent communication
• Proactive, curious, continuous improvement mindset
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively
• Leads complex assignments; mentors others
• Able to simplify complex information for broad audiences
• Ability to adapt to evolving pipelines, new workload accounts, and emerging cloud technologies. Forward‑looking mindset to support next‑generation platform direction
• Strong operational support and incident‑management capability, with the ability to diagnose issues, manage escalations, execute recovery workflows, and communicate risks clearly while maintaining a problem‑solving mindset.

Soft Skills & Behavioral Expectations

The hiring manager emphasized communication and ownership as critical:

• Must communicate clearly with delivery teams and business stakeholders.
• Able to translate technical issues into business‑friendly language.
• Must take responsibility, not deflect issues to others.
• Should maintain a calm, professional demeanor and accept feedback well.
• Needs to collaborate effectively across multiple partner teams.

Past challenges on the team have involved unclear communication and lack of ownership-this hire must avoid those pitfalls.

Interview Process

· 1 interview - virtual