Senior IT Engineer - Platform Engineering

Xcel Energy•Minneapolis, MN

23d

About The Position

Are you looking for an exciting job where you can put your skills and talents to work at a company you can feel proud to be a part of? Do you want a workplace that will challenge you and offer you opportunities to learn and grow? A position at Xcel Energy could be just what you’re looking for. Position Summary The Sr. IT Engineer – Platform Engineering is a key technical contributor responsible for building, operating, and evolving Xcel Energy’s cloud platform and infrastructure services. This role owns the reliability, scalability, and automation of our platform footprint—designing the guardrails, tooling, and infrastructure that enable delivery teams to move quickly while maintaining strong security, compliance, and operational excellence. You will support the cloud platform capabilities that power Xcel Energy’s digital operations, ensuring stability and security across our multi‑tenant cloud environments. In this role, you will partner closely with architecture, security, and engineering teams to influence platform strategy, modernize infrastructure patterns, and drive adoption of best‑in‑class cloud capabilities. Your work directly improves system reliability, cost efficiency, developer experience, and the simplicity of the cloud operating model across the organization.

Requirements

Ten years of related functional experience.
Bachelor's degree in technology, Science, Business or related field, or 4 years of experience equivalent to the position.
Excellent communication skills, effective with varying organizational levels and skill set, and able to translate between technical and non-technical concepts.
Excellent Relationship Management and collaboration skills, with a track record of working as one team cross-organizationally to drive innovation and business results.
Expertise managing the lifecycle of technical solutions.
Deep Subject Matter Expertise within the respective system domain products, platforms, processes and architecture.
Broad and deep knowledge of technology architecture, infrastructure, network, security and software principles and models.
Experience working in partnership with internal and external vendors.
Excellent analytical, problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
Extensive knowledge of future technology trends within area of expertise.
Demonstrated leadership on technical aspects of large-scale projects.
Experience coaching other developers in system deployment or operational troubleshooting.
Experience with delivery methodologies (Waterfall, Agile, Scrum) and operational models (ITIL)
Experience and understanding of core IT Service Management functions, such as Change Management and Incident Management.

Nice To Haves

Deep technical expertise with AWS services (EC2, EKS, VPC networking, load balancers, S3, IAM, Route 53, RDS, ECS).
Strong proficiency with Terraform and automated multi‑environment infrastructure delivery.
Hands‑on experience with Kubernetes internals, workload orchestration, scaling, and observability.
Ability to diagnose complex distributed systems across compute, network, and storage boundaries.
Strong cloud security fundamentals: least privilege, secrets management, policy enforcement, and compliance controls.
Linux system administration experience with strong scripting and automation skills; proficient in version control (e.g., GitLab) and CI/CD fundamentals.
Familiarity with integrating Ansible Automation Platform into infrastructure workflows using source control, CI/CD pipelines, and terraform for automated, compliant deployments.
Demonstrated leadership in designing and delivering scalable platform solutions.
Experience with delivery methodologies (Agile, Scrum, Waterfall) and ITSM/ITIL practices.
Excellent collaboration, communication, analytical, and problem‑solving skills.

Responsibilities

Solution Delivery & Platform Engineering Design, build, and maintain core cloud infrastructure across compute, networking, storage, IAM, and shared platform services.
Develop secure, automated, and auditable environments using Terraform and Infrastructure‑as‑Code best practices.
Lead platform and system design activities in alignment with Enterprise Architecture, Security, Compliance, and operational requirements.
Collaborate closely with engineering teams to deliver high‑impact platform capabilities that increase reliability, scalability, performance, and developer velocity.
Contribute to initiatives in containerization, observability, cost optimization, and AI platform enablement, while influencing architectural direction and platform strategy across the organization.
Operations & Reliability Engineering Operate and optimize AWS environments to ensure availability, performance, efficiency, and capacity readiness.
Continuously monitor and maintain system health while identifying technical debt and operational risks.
Troubleshoot complex distributed system issues across compute, storage, networking, containers, and identity layers.
Support daily cloud operations including incident response, problem management, scalability improvements, and quota/capacity planning.
Implement and maintain monitoring, logging, alerting, and compliance controls in partnership with security and operations teams.
Ensure all infrastructure follows cloud security best practices, including least privilege, secrets management, vulnerability handling, and policy enforcement.
Subject Matter Expertise Stay current with emerging trends in cloud platforms, Kubernetes, DevOps, security, and infrastructure automation, and apply this knowledge to continuously evolve the platform.
Serve as a subject matter expert for AWS services such as EC2, VPC, S3, RDS, Route 53, IAM, and ECS/EKS.
Provide technical leadership and introduce innovative ideas that strengthen platform reliability, reduce cost to deliver, improve developer experience, and advance sustainability across the cloud ecosystem.
Relationship Management & Leadership Mentor and guide engineers to promote strong engineering practices and operational excellence.
Conduct peer reviews, approve technical designs, and provide clear technical guidance to stakeholders.
Partner effectively across architecture, product, data, platform, and security teams to deliver cohesive and efficient solutions.
Oversee vendor activities related to the design, delivery, and operation of cloud services, ensuring alignment with organizational standards and platform objectives.