Advancement Cloud Engineer II

USF Advancement connects the university with donors who want to make a difference by providing philanthropic support to promote student success, research, academic excellence and other strategic priorities. With an endowment that now exceeds $700 million in value, our dedicated team of approximately 200 professionals, including 60 fundraisers, encompasses alumni, development and foundation operations. The team is responsible for raising more than $150 million annually and has broken records year after year with more than $184 million raised in fiscal year 2025. This position supports the cloud, platform, integration, and reliability capabilities that enable USF Advancement's fundraising, engagement, operations, and analytics work. This role sits within the Enterprise Digital Platforms and Engineering pillar and helps engineer, operate, secure, monitor, and modernize the digital platform ecosystem used across Advancement. This position is responsible for hands-on cloud engineering and operational support for Advancement's Azure environments, CRM platform operations, application modernization efforts, integrations, monitoring, resiliency, and technical vendor/platform stewardship. The role works closely with Central IT, Microsoft, Ellucian, Blackbaud, Fundmetric, Asana, VanillaSoft, and other technology partners to ensure Advancement's platforms are reliable, secure, scalable, well-documented, and operating at peak effectiveness. The role is not limited to traditional infrastructure. It supports the transition from on-premises systems and one-off application hosting toward reusable, secure, automated, cloud-based platforms that can be operated as enterprise capabilities for the division. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, MIS or other field involving software and analytical training, or a Bachelor's degree with no specific required field and one year of IT related work experience, OR a combination of 5 years of IT related work experience and validated training. Preparation for a relevant IT certification, validated through certification requirements and documentation of completion, is considered to be related training.

Degree Equivalency Clause:

Four years of direct experience for a bachelor's degree.

• Senate Bill 1310- The Florida Senate (https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1310) is conditional upon meeting all employment eligibility requirements in the U.S.
• SB 1310: Substitution of Work Experience for Postsecondary Education Requirements
• A public employer may include a postsecondary degree as a baseline requirement only as an alternative to the number of years of direct experience required, not to exceed:
• (a) Two years of direct experience for an associate degree;
• (b) Four years of direct experience for a bachelor's degree;
• (c) Six years of direct experience for a master's degree;
• (d) Seven years of direct experience for a professional degree; or
• (e) Nine years of direct experience for a doctoral degree
• Related work experience may not substitute for any required licensure, certification, or registration required for the position of employment as established by the public employer and indicated in the advertised description of the position of employment.
• Minimum Qualifications that require a high school diploma are exempt from SB 1310.

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience with Microsoft Azure services such as Azure Virtual Machines, App Services, Azure SQL, Storage Accounts, Key Vault, Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, Azure Functions, Azure Networking, and Azure Backup. Experience with Microsoft Entra ID, role-based access control, conditional access concepts, service principals, managed identities, and secure access patterns. Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automation tools such as Bicep, Terraform, Azure CLI, PowerShell, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Ansible, or similar tools. Experience with Docker, containers, CI/CD pipelines, web application hosting, API integrations, and modern application deployment patterns. Experience with SQL Server, MySQL, ETL/ELT processes, scheduled jobs, file transfers, APIs, and integration monitoring. Familiarity with Microsoft Power Platform, Dataverse, Microsoft Fabric, OneLake, Lakehouse concepts, or Dynamics 365. Experience supporting CRM, fundraising, advancement, higher education, nonprofit, or enterprise SaaS platforms. Experience working with vendor platforms and technical support teams to resolve integration, reliability, performance, access, or configuration issues. Microsoft certifications such as AZ-104, AZ-305, AZ-400, SC-300, PL-400, DP-600, or related certifications. Cloud Platform Engineering

• Configure, support, and optimize Advancement's Azure cloud environments, subscriptions, resource groups, networking, identity/access patterns, storage, databases, monitoring, and platform services.
• Implement cloud solutions based on approved architecture, security, compliance, and operational standards.
• Support the migration of on-premises workloads to Azure, including assessment, planning, validation, testing, cutover support, and post-migration optimization.
• Help establish repeatable cloud patterns for application hosting, integration services, data platform foundations, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, and operational support.
• Use infrastructure-as-code, scripting, templates, automation, and repeatable deployment practices where appropriate.
• Partner with Central IT and Microsoft to ensure Advancement has the access, subscription model, governance, and support model needed to operate effectively within the university Azure tenant. Platform Reliability and Operations
• Monitor the health, availability, performance, and reliability of Advancement's cloud and platform ecosystem.
• Help design and maintain a system health dashboard covering critical systems, integrations, data pipelines, scheduled jobs, cloud services, vendor systems, and operational dependencies.
• Develop alerting, runbooks, escalation paths, and operational procedures for critical Advancement platforms.
• Troubleshoot and resolve cloud, platform, application hosting, integration, and service availability issues.
• Perform root cause analysis and recommend long-term fixes for recurring operational problems.
• Participate in incident response, maintenance windows, and on-call or after-hours support for mission-critical systems when needed.
• Maintain documentation for cloud environments, architecture, configurations, operational procedures, service dependencies, and support handoffs. Application Modernization and Integration Support
• Support modernization and re-platforming of Advancement applications from legacy or on-premises environments into Azure or other approved enterprise platforms.
• Work with application developers, Power Platform engineers, data engineers, and solution architects to ensure applications are hosted, integrated, monitored, and secured appropriately.
• Support containerized, web, database, API, and scheduled-job workloads across development, test, staging, and production environments.
• Assist with CI/CD, source control, deployment pipelines, automated testing, and release practices where appropriate.
• Support integration patterns involving APIs, gateways, file transfers, cloud services, identity services, databases, CRM, payment systems, and vendor platforms.
• Help assess whether workloads should be migrated as-is, re-platformed, refactored, retired, replaced, or moved into Power Platform or SaaS solutions. CRM, Data Platform, and Microsoft Ecosystem Support
• Support the technical platform operations for Advancement's CRM ecosystem, including current CRM Advance operations and future Dynamics 365/Azure-related platform needs.
• Support platform-level operations for Microsoft Dataverse, Power Platform, Microsoft Fabric, OneLake, Lakehouse, and related Microsoft services as they are adopted by Advancement.
• Partner with Data Intelligence and Trust on data platform foundations while respecting the distinction between platform operations and data definitions, analytics logic, and semantic governance.
• Support secure access, integration readiness, monitoring, environment management, and operational reliability for cloud-hosted data and CRM platform services.
• Participate in technical planning and validation for CRM upgrades, data platform changes, and major Advancement platform transitions. Technical Vendor and SaaS Platform Stewardship
• Serve as a technical partner for vendor-managed Advancement platforms, including systems such as Blackbaud, Asana, VanillaSoft, Fundmetric, Ellucian CRM Advance, and other SaaS or partner-managed platforms.
• Work with vendors and business owners to ensure platforms are configured, integrated, monitored, secured, and supported according to Advancement's operational needs.
• Help translate business issues into technical questions, escalation paths, vendor support cases, and actionable remediation plans.
• Review vendor technical documentation, integration requirements, security requirements, APIs, data export/import capabilities, uptime commitments, and operational dependencies.
• Track and escalate technical risks when vendor systems, integrations, support models, or platform limitations threaten Advancement operations.
• Partner with Digital Experience on solution evaluation and adoption while owning the technical operability, integration, and reliability perspective. Security, Compliance, and Governance
• Apply security, compliance, and risk-aware practices to cloud and platform engineering work.
• Implement least-privilege access, secure configuration, logging, monitoring, backup, recovery, and data protection practices.
• Collaborate with Central IT, Information Security, Technology Risk/Trust/Governance, and other university partners to align Advancement platforms with university policies and standards.
• Support audit readiness through documentation, access reviews, configuration records, operational evidence, and change records.
• Identify and recommend improvements to reduce platform risk, operational fragility, technical debt, and manual workarounds. Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Work closely with Digital Experience, Data Intelligence and Trust, Advancement business units, Central IT, vendors, and consultants.
• Participate in planning, requirements review, technical design, testing, implementation, and operational readiness conversations.
• Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Help ensure that technology decisions consider reliability, scalability, supportability, integration, security, cost, and long-term operational impact.
• Contribute to a culture of documentation, continuous improvement, ownership, collaboration, and disciplined execution.