Senior IT Engineer - Platform Engineering

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.

Essential 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.

Minimum 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.

Preferred Requirements:

• 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.

As a leading combination electricity and natural gas energy company, Xcel Energy offers a comprehensive portfolio of energy-related products and services to 3.4 million electricity and 1.9 million natural gas customers across eight Western and Midwestern states. At Xcel Energy, we strive to be the preferred and trusted provider of the energy our customers need. If you’re ready to be a part of something big, we invite you to join our team.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.

Individuals with a disability who need an accommodation to apply please contact us at recruiting@xcelenergy.com.

Non-Bargaining

The anticipated starting base pay for this position is: $112,200.00 to $159,400.00 per year

This position is eligible for the following benefits: Annual Incentive Program, Medical/Pharmacy Plan, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, Dependent Care Reimbursement Account, Health Care Reimbursement Account, Health Savings Account (HSA) (if enrolled in eligible health plan), Limited-Purpose FSA (if enrolled in eligible health plan and HSA), Transportation Reimbursement Account, Short-term disability (STD), Long-term disability (LTD), Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Fitness Center Reimbursement (if enrolled in eligible health plan), Tuition reimbursement, Transit programs, Employee recognition program, Pension, 401(k) plan, Paid time off (PTO), Holidays, Volunteer Paid Time Off (VPTO), Parental Leave

Benefit plans are subject to change and Xcel Energy has the right to end, suspend, or amend any of its plans, at any time, in whole or in part.

In any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information including but not limited to dates of school attendance and graduation.  You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.

Deadline to Apply: 01/28/26

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All Xcel Energy employees and contractors share responsibility for protecting the company's information and systems by adhering to cybersecurity policies, standards, and best practices, recognizing that cybersecurity is everyone's responsibility.

 

ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT

Xcel Energy endeavors to make https://www.xcelenergy.com/ accessible to any and all users. If you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website or need assistance completing the application process, please contact Xcel Energy Talent Acquisition at recruiting@xcelenergy.com. This contact information is for accommodation requests only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications.