Platform Engineer II – Cloud Backup & Recovery (AWS/GCP)

Who We Are

Join a team that puts its People First! Since 1889, First American (NYSE: FAF) has held an unwavering belief in its people. They are passionate about what they do, and we are equally passionate about fostering an environment where all feel welcome, supported, and empowered to be innovative and reach their full potential. Our inclusive, people-first culture has earned our company numerous accolades, including being named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list for ten consecutive years. We have also earned awards as a best place to work for women, diversity and LGBTQ+ employees, and have been included on more than 50 regional best places to work lists. First American will always strive to be a great place to work, for all. For more information, please visit www.careers.firstam.com.

What We Do

The Enterprise Backup & Recovery Platform (EBRP) team designs, builds, and operates secure, resilient, cloud-based backup solutions that protect critical business systems across First American. Our platform supports AWS and GCP environments and leverages logically air-gapped and immutable design principles to ensure recoverability, security, and regulatory compliance.  We are seeking a Platform Engineer II to help evolve and operate our multi-cloud backup platform. This role blends infrastructure engineering, operational reliability, and automation development to deliver secure and scalable backup services across the enterprise.  *We are open to remote candidates for this role

Role Overview 

This role is comprised of approximately: 

• 50% Platform Engineering 
• 30% Backup Operations & Reliability 
• 20% Development & Automation 

As a Platform Engineer II, you will independently deliver infrastructure solutions of moderate scope, contribute to automation and platform improvements, and support the operational health of production backup systems. You will work under general supervision while collaborating closely with senior engineers and cross-functional teams. 

Platform Engineering (50%) 

• Design, implement, and maintain cloud infrastructure supporting enterprise backup services across AWS and GCP 
• Define and manage infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform preferred) 
• Translate engineering requirements into secure, scalable cloud architecture solutions 
• Modify and enhance existing platform components to improve resiliency, performance, and maintainability 
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines supporting infrastructure and platform deployments 
• Contribute to IAM design, least-privilege access models, and secure cloud architecture patterns 
• Develop detailed technical specifications and documentation for infrastructure implementations 
• Partner with Security, Infrastructure, and Application teams to ensure successful platform integrations 
  

Backup Operations & Reliability (30%) 

• Monitor and maintain production backup jobs, replication workflows, and recovery processes 
• Troubleshoot backup failures and restore issues across AWS and GCP environments 
• Perform platform maintenance, installations, upgrades, and lifecycle management activities 
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and corrective action planning 
• Support disaster recovery testing and validation efforts to ensure alignment with RPO/RTO objectives 
• Improve operational runbooks and documentation to enhance reliability and efficiency 
• Participate in on-call support as required by business needs 
  

Development & Automation (20%) 

• Leverage AI-assisted development tools to reduce operational toil, improve code quality, and automate repetitive engineering tasks 
• Develop automation scripts and tooling (Python, Bash, or similar) to reduce manual operational effort 
• Build and enhance pipeline automation to ensure the quality and reliability of infrastructure changes 
• Create internal tools used by Platform Engineering and partner teams 
• Contribute to automated validation and regression testing for platform updates 
• Document technical designs and implementation details to support knowledge sharing 

Experience 

• 2–5 years of directly related experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or DevOps 
• Experience defining infrastructure and platform capabilities using Infrastructure-as-Code and automation technologies 
• Hands-on experience with AWS required; familiarity with GCP strongly preferred 
• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines and build automation tools 
• Practical experience leveraging AI-assisted development or automation tools to improve engineering productivity and reduce manual effort 
• Experience troubleshooting production cloud systems 
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field or equivalent combination of education, certifications, and experience
  

Technical Skills 

• Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or similar) 
• Familiarity with multiple IaC tools (Terraform preferred; CloudFormation acceptable) 
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automation, and build tools 
• Working knowledge of cloud networking fundamentals (VPCs, subnets, routing, security groups/firewalls) 
• Familiarity with AWS and GCP core services (IAM, object storage, logging/monitoring, compute) 
• Familiarity with LLM-assisted coding tools and models (e.g., Cursor/Copilot, and Claude/GPT) and their secure use in dev/CI workflows. 
• Understanding of backup and disaster recovery concepts (RPO, RTO, retention policies, immutability) 
• Experience with monitoring and logging systems (CloudWatch, Cloud Logging, or similar) 
• Strong written and verbal communication skills 

Growth Opportunities 

• Exposure to enterprise-scale multi-cloud infrastructure (AWS & GCP) 
• Experience operating in a highly regulated financial services environment 
• Opportunity to contribute to secure, air-gapped, and immutable backup architectures 
• Career progression path toward Senior Platform Engineer  
• Access to cloud training and certification resources

What We Offer

By choice, we don’t simply accept individuality – we embrace it, we support it, and we thrive on it! Our People First Culture celebrates diversity, equity and inclusion not simply because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s the key to our success. We are proud to foster an authentic and inclusive workplace For All. You are free and encouraged to bring your entire, unique self to work. First American is an equal opportunity employer in every sense of the term.

Based on eligibility, First American offers a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401k, PTO/paid sick leave and other great benefits like an employee stock purchase plan.

Pay Range: $97,700.00 - $130,300.00 Annually

This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on a number of factors which may include job-related knowledge, skills, experience, business requirements and geographic location.