Cloud Engineer at Princeton University
Princeton, NJ
$130,000–$140,000from the description
Jul 7, 2026
Princeton, NJ
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior cloud engineering role embedded in a small research-focused team at Princeton, responsible for designing and running Azure-based infrastructure — including AKS clusters, Databricks workspaces, data pipelines, and a self-hosted observability stack — that supports large-scale academic study of the information environment. The work spans infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, backend services in Python or TypeScript, ML infrastructure, and security compliance, requiring someone equally at home architecting systems and writing production code.
Senior level · 5+ years · New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 3 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 640 people in the New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 340–830
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $170,499 (middle half $133,523–$210,499). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The title is 'Cloud Engineer' with no seniority modifier, so advertised seniority is Unspecified; however, the posting explicitly describes the role as 'senior, self-directing' in the body text and the internal experience level label reads 'Mid-Senior Level' — the 5–8 year requirement and scope support Senior.
SOC classification is Medium confidence: the role ships code (backend services, APIs, data pipelines, CI/CD, IaC) squarely in 15-1252 territory, but a substantial portion of day-to-day work is operating and maintaining cloud infrastructure, making 15-1244 a plausible runner-up.
The posting is at Princeton University in Princeton, NJ. The closest CBSA is New York-Newark-Jersey City (35620), which covers the Princeton/Mercer County area; there is no standalone Princeton CBSA.
Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus are listed as required under the Skills section with the qualifier 'equivalent stack experience considered' — the alternatives qualifier means the specific tools are interchangeable as a set, but the observability stack capability itself is a hard gate.
A bachelor's degree is explicitly stated as 'preferred but not required — equivalent professional experience will be considered,' so the degree requirement is set to None.
TypeScript/Node.js and Go are listed as acceptable second-language alternatives to Python; they appear in the required qualifications section but as interchangeable options, so they are captured as a single preferred skill with alternatives.
Bicep is explicitly called 'a plus' in the required section ('Bicep familiarity a plus'), so it is treated as preferred despite appearing near required skills.
MLflow and Hugging Face Hub appear under the Preferred section and are marked accordingly.
React appears only under the Preferred section and is marked accordingly.
Read the full posting
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