Cloud Engineer

About the role
The Rapid Product Development (RPD) team serves as the Mendix Center of Excellence. As a technology platform team we focus on enabling the development of highquality Mendix applications that meet our standards. While product teams maintain full ownership of their applications our mission is to simplify and support that ownership.

One key way we streamline this process is by reducing the complexity of hosting and deploying Mendix applications on our private cloud through a standard deployment environment (Fargate RDS S3 ELB) that can be parameterized by developers. This environment is used by 20 teams deploying 50 apps on TAP environments. The coming years this will expand to 30 teams deploying more than 120 applications.

To simplify deployment we have developed an internal Mendix deployment tool called Max. Maxs core purpose is to streamline the deployment process hiding the underlying complexities of application deployment and hosting. It serves as an abstraction layer over our build and deployment pipeline which is constructed with Terraform and Cloud Foundry (CF) and accessible via REST APIs through the AWS Service Catalog.

Our private cloud team delivers a robust readytouse cloud foundation. Building on this we have introduced a standardized environment tailored for Mendix applications. Previously this work was outsourced but we are bringing these responsibilities inhouse to boost control speed and efficiency. Your mission is to take full ownership of this environment managing and extending it to align with our vision: a fully automated highperformance Mendix stack.

Tasks

Key responsibilities
Some of your key responsibilities include:
Technical support: Act as a primary resource for technical support within the Mendix community on infrastructurerelated aspects of the Mendix stack. Your role is to perform proper RCA and propose solutions that help us fully automate our stack.
Infrastructure expertise: Serve as the infrastructure expert within the RPD team staying updated on the latest changes in our private cloud. Take proactive ownership of communications with our private cloud team for support or clarification when needed. Discuss these priorities with the PO and architect of the RPD team.
Collaborative focus on Mendix stack: Work closely with the RPD team with a dedicated focus on the Mendix infrastructure stack. As the subject matter expert manage and address dependencies on the Mendix stack to support and enhance the developer experience and streamline improvements.
As the subject matter expert your role is to come up with ways we can improve our current setup. Below are some of the enhancements that we have in mind.
Facilitate GitLab migration: Transition from JFrog Artifactory to GitLab as the main repository for Mendix build packs ensuring seamless integration and efficient pipeline setup.
Optimize build pipeline: Futureproof the Mendix build pipeline enhancing deployment efficiency and reducing maintenance overhead.
Security and compliance: Implement shortlived tokens secure IAM roles and conduct regular security assessments to align our policies and strengthen the platforms defense against cyber threats.
CI/CD and pipeline optimization: Reorganize and standardize the Mendix CI/CD pipeline for compliance adopting trunkbased development to accelerate deployment.
Infrastructure flexibility: Expand database and instance options for Mendix applications to enhance performance and provide AWS recommendations for optimized configurations.
Network configuration and data management: Enable internal routing within our private cloud plan for static IPs and improve S3 data deletion processes for efficient management.
Documentation and continuous improvement: Maintain comprehensive documentation of cloud processes and drive ongoing improvements in cloud architecture and automation.

Requirements

What youll bring
Cloud infrastructure expertise: Strong experience with AWS services particularly Fargate ECS S3 RDS and Service Catalog. You understand how to deploy manage and optimize containerized applications in AWS and youre comfortable working with serverless and containerbased architectures.
Proficiency in infrastructure as code (IaC): Handson knowledge of Terraform and AWS CloudFormation for provisioning and managing cloud resources with an eye toward scalability security and maintainability.
Containerization and CI/CD knowledge: Solid experience with Docker for containerization and GitLab for managing CI/CD pipelines. Youre skilled in configuring and optimizing build and deployment pipelines.
Security and secret management: Familiarity with Vault or similar tools for securing secrets and managing authentication within application environments.
Collaborative and proactive: You thrive in a collaborative environment and you are proactive and continuously looking for ways we can improving the developer experience.
Kubernetes: Experience working with Kubernetes. You understand container orchestration scaling and resource management and youre excited to bring your expertise to help architect a robust Kubernetesdriven infrastructure for future growth.
Communication: Clear and concise communicator who can tackle complex technical architectural or organizational challenges and propose thorough iterative solutions.
Proven project ownership: Experience leading projects from concept to production including proposal discussion and execution with a proactive selfmanaging approach.
Proficiency in English: Excellent written and verbal English skills.
Positive and solutionoriented: You approach challenges with a positive mindset and are driven by finding effective solutions to support team goals.
Nice to Have Understanding of Mendix: We do not expect you to develop software using Mendix but familiarity with the Mendix platform and its deployment considerations would be beneficial.