Cloud Engineer

WHO WE ARE: Xactus (pronounced ‘Zac-tus’) is the leading verification innovator for the mortgage industry. We have over 6,500 clients ranging from the largest bank and non-bank mortgage originators to credit unions and mortgage brokers. Xactus works closely with our clients to digitally integrate a 360° approach to verification across their workflows. As a result, lenders can easily access the technology necessary to meet consumer demands for a modern mortgage experience with industry-leading speed, reliability, and accuracy – while also closing more loans more quickly with greater profitability. Xactus is proud to provide a friendly work environment that is primarily remote. Our workforce provides many opportunities for you to enhance your skills with our top-notch financial leadership team who prioritizes building talent. If you are curious and searching for a change that will be fun and rewarding, please reach out to us! We would love to have you on our team! WHO YOU ARE: You are a career-minded, driven individual who is looking for a position that challenges you and supports your professional development. THE BENEFITS WE OFFER: A friendly, supportive environment which is highly rated by Xactus employees. Feedback from our employees says: “The people I work with treat each other with respect,” “I feel accepted by my coworkers,” and “The person I report to cares about me as a person.” Xactus offers medical, vision and dental insurances, bonus programs, fitness reimbursement and other healthy life-style programs through our benefits carrier, 401k plan with a company match, short and long-term disability, life insurance, accident and critical illness insurance, health savings account, flexible spending account, employee assistance program, legal services, employee discounts and more. SUMMARY: The Cloud Engineer helps design, build, and operate platform capabilities that empower product teams across Xactus. This position works on infrastructure-as-code, GitOps-based pipelines, CI/CD tooling, observability, platform security and compliance, and internal developer platform components. The Cloud Engineer is a technical leader and mentor, collaborate closely with product teams, and contribute to reliability, performance, and platform adoption. This role is both execution and leadership-focused: the Cloud Engineer will write code, design reusable platform modules, lead RFC/ADR discussions, own incident response activities, and help shape platform strategy and operating practices. ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS The following is a list of essential functions, which is subject to change at any time and without advance notice.  Management may assign new duties, reassign existing duties, or eliminate a function based on business needs or at its sole discretion. ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: - Design, implement, and maintain cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, or equivalent). - Build, maintain and evolve GitOps and CI/CD pipelines (ArgoCD/Flux, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.) to support self-service platform capabilities and developer workflows. - Operate and scale Kubernetes-based workloads (EKS/GKE/AKS), including cluster lifecycle, networking, and security hardening. - Implement and maintain platform observability and reliability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry); define SLIs/SLOs and monitor MTTR. - Drive platform security and compliance: IAM, secrets management (Vault or similar), certificate management, logging and audit, and partner with InfoSec for audits (SOC2/PCI/etc.). - Author and review RFCs/ADRs and contribute to platform architecture decisions and Tech Radar. - Own incident response playbooks and runbooks; participate in on-call rotation and blameless postmortems - Build reusable platform modules and templates to accelerate engineering teams’ adoption of platform services. - Collaborate cross-functionally with product teams to onboard services, agree ownership boundaries, and ensure smooth rollouts. - Mentor and coach junior engineers; participate in hiring and technical interviews. - Contribute to cost optimization, tooling improvements, and continuous improvement initiatives (hackathons, health assessments). - Stand up and maintain multi-account cloud architectures and IaC modules. - Create GitHub Organizations policies and shared starter repos / templates for service onboarding. - Improve platform observability by defining SLIs/SLOs and implementing automated alerting and runbooks. -  Build/extend an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to enable self-service deployments and developer productivity. - Automate certificate management lifecycle, DNS provisioning, and cross-account networking. - Partner with InfoSec to implement guardrails for compliance and secure-by-default patterns. QUALIFICATIONS: To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. EDUCATION AND/OR EXPERIENCE: - High School Diploma or equivalent. - 5+ years of professional experience working with cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP acceptable). - 3+ years of hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform strongly preferred; Terragrunt/CloudFormation/Pulumi). SKILLS AND COMPETENTCIES: - Strong written and verbal communication skills - 5+ years of professional experience working with cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP acceptable). - 3+ years of hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform strongly preferred; Terragrunt/CloudFormation/Pulumi). - Strong experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes) and platform-level operations (cluster provisioning, networking, ingress, service mesh familiarity helpful). - Practical experience building and operating GitOps and CI/CD pipelines (ArgoCD/Flux, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.). - Proven SRE/operational experience: SLO/SLI design, incident response, postmortems, and improving MTTR. - Solid observability experience (Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent) and instrumentation (OpenTelemetry). - Strong scripting and programming skills (Python, Go, Bash, or similar). - Good knowledge of cloud networking (VPC, routing, LB, DNS), IAM, and security best practices. - Experience with secret management tools (HashiCorp Vault or equivalent) and certificate automation. - Comfortable using Jira, Confluence, and GitHub. Experience with RFC/ADR processes. - Excellent communication skills: able to work effectively with product teams, security, and stakeholders. - Demonstrated track record of delivering production-ready platforms and enabling developer productivity. - (Preferred) Prior platform engineering or internal developer platform (IDP) experience. - (Preferred) Experience with Flux/ArgoCD, Terragrunt, Helm charts, Kustomize. - (Preferred) Experience operating multi-region or multi-account cloud environments and cross-account IAM. - (Preferred) Experience with cost-optimization tools and practices for cloud spend reduction. - (Preferred) Familiarity with compliance frameworks (SOC2, PCI-DSS). - (Preferred) Experience in mentoring/leadership roles and improving team processes (agile coaching, backlog management). - (Preferred) Experience with CSPM or CNAPP platforms (e.g. Wiz, Orca, Lacework) WORKING CONDITIONS: - Traditional office environment with low-to-moderate office noise (computers, phones and business conversations). The position may be remote from main offices. - May require flexibility in hours. PHYSICAL DEMANDS: Xactus promotes an equal opportunity workplace, which includes reasonable accommodations of otherwise qualified disabled applicants and team members. Please contact your supervisor with questions regarding the physical demands of this position. - Lifting/carrying up to 10 lbs. - Manual dexterity for computer work - Speaking, hearing and vision are required to perform essential functions.