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.

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.

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.

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.

Stay current with emerging trends in cloud platforms, Kubernetes, Dev Ops, 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.

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.

• 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…