Associate Director, Cloud AWS

Diversity of backgrounds, ideas, thoughts, and experiences is vital to our culture and the way we do business. Creating an environment where differences are embraced and where every person feels engaged and included makes us safer, stronger, and more successful.

With a history dating back to 1886, American Water (NYSE: AWK) is the largest and most geographically diverse U.S. publicly traded water and wastewater utility company. The company employs more than 6,400 dedicated professionals who provide regulated and regulated-like drinking water and wastewater services to an estimated 14 million people in 25 states. American Water provides safe, clean, affordable and reliable water services to our customers to help keep their lives flowing. For more information, visit amwater.com and follow American Water on Twitter , Facebook and LinkedIn .

PLEASE NOTE: In order for American Water to evaluate decisions about new regulations, reintegration, and safe operating practices, all employees are required to report their vaccination status.
Primary Role
Provide leadership and oversight of the preparation, review and consolidation of IT capital investment budgeting plans and operating expense budgets. Contribute to the creation of multi-year strategy, roadmap and investment plans working with the various T&I Directors to ensure consistency, alignment, and measurements across IT. Drive costs down across the technology landscape based on internal and external benchmarking. Ensure a continuous line of communication is kept open with the appropriate sponsors/stakeholders to maintain a high level of financial program awareness, provide timely recognition and resolution of problems, and identify follow-on business opportunities. Act as a change agent within the spend and vendor management space to drive transformational change, sponsor change initiatives, and enable others to innovate. Develop and sustain critical business relationships with strategic partners.
Key Accountabilities

Define, execute, and enhance the vision and mission of the Cloud Platform and Dev/Sec/Ops strategy aligning to industry best practices

Deliver business results and maintain exceptional levels of budget management to the point where IT financial spend is exceedingly predictable

Collaborate with all IT departments and core business functional areas to be pro-active, timely, and accurate

Design, Code, Implement, and Support Cloud product releases and enhancements.

Transform requirements for new capabilities or changes from architects, operations, or customers to include them in the design of Cloud components

Work in close collaboration with Architects, Design Experts, and Operations to integrate new solutions and perform post release L3/L4 operational support.

Maintain backlog and support Scrum Master and Product Manager for prioritization of release items and Sprint planning.

Create Cloud Service guidelines, standards including coding languages, code with comments, version control, version documentation, security considerations, audit requirement, change & release management

Ensure operational supportability of design/development by working with operations team during design and development phase to ensure the developed solutions are always operationally supportable and are properly documented.

Take accountability to ensure adherence with Security and Compliance policies.

Document as required by quality, qualification processes and cloud platform services.

Help to drive architectural improvements and standardization of Cloud environments

Develop and enhance automated DevSecOps processes to release new solutions into the live environment.

Ensure controls are in place for all configuration items and only authorized changes are made for all assets within the enterprise IT environment.

Knowledge/Skills

• Visible leadership skills and executive presence
• Demonstrate ability to communicate narratives to executives at all levels of the Company including the CFO, COO, CTIO, and other executive leadership members
• A confident technology leader who has the gravitas and communication skills to influence decision-making at the most senior levels and to motivate colleagues across all levels
• Thoughtful point of view on industry and best practices for driving IT operational effectiveness and efficiencies
• Knowledge of business principles from multiple disciplines and ability to apply those principles to achieve results in cross-functional projects
• Ability to solve, successfully and independently, complex tasks through own decision making
• Demonstrates ability to work across many levels of an organization from VP to individual contributor and to operate effectively in a matrixed organizational structure
• Strong interpersonal and presentation abilities required – both verbal and written, with the ability to articulate and educate others who have varying degrees of technical knowledge
• Expert knowledge of process improvement and project delivery in an IT/Digital environment, working across multiple businesses in both Waterfall and Agile delivery approaches
• Experience with developing key performance metrics for programs and projects and their visual presentation to senior stakeholders
• Customer oriented approach in managing communications and issues

Experience/Education

15 years of progressive Information Technology experience with demonstrated ability to lead IT operational processes and teams

5 years’ of relevant experience, working on a broad range of AWS technologies (e.g. EC2, RDS, ELB, ECS, EKS, S3, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, KMS) to develop and maintain AWS based cloud solution, with an emphasis on best practices of cloud security.

Engineering experience – responsible for influencing the design of complex public cloud Infrastructure solutions in view of automated operations

Capability to think in terms of business value in the architecture and design of public cloud solutions end-to-end.

Experience with DevOps Orchestration/Configuration/Continuous Integration technologies such as Docker, Jenkins, Ansible, Chef, and Puppet.

Management of continuous integration services and pipelines like Jenkins using CFT / Terraform and Ansible

Experience in Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS)

Experience in scripting and automation skills with one or more of the following: Python, Bash, Groovy, CFT, Terraform in an operational setting.

Knowledge of IP networking and security in AWS – VPNs, DNS, Load Balancing

Comfortable being the first line of defense in the event of an outage, capable of working with multiple vendors to arrive at a solution ASAP - Good at mitigating the outage to keep our business running

Has one eye on cost, and one eye on the needs of the team.

Track record of delivering projects on time and on budget, passion for coding, and good oral and written communication skills.

Continues to iterate on Architecture to improve performance / reliability / durability / flexibility

Bachelor’s degree required in any associated discipline including Business Administration, Management Information Systems and Computer

Masters or MBA preferred

Industry Certifications preferred

Travel Requirements

As necessary, up to 20 %

Work Environment

Primarily in an office environment

Competencies Champions safety Collaborates Customer obsessed Cultivates innovation Drives Results Nimble learning

Join American Water... We Keep Life Flowing ™

American Water is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and prohibits employment discrimination for employees and applicants based on his or her age, race, color, pregnancy, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, marital status, citizenship, or because they are an individual with a disability, protected veteran or other status protected by federal, state, and local laws.