AWS Cloud Platform Engineer

Location: Reston, VA - Hybrid

About the Role

Seeking an experienced and dynamic AWS Cloud Platform Engineer to provide hands-on technical expertise for supporting our AWS footprint, including Security and Guardrails. You will design, implement, and integrate cloud platform resources on Amazon Web Services (AWS), collaborating with a team of talented cloud engineers and technology teams to deliver scalable, reliable, and secure cloud solutions that support our company's growth and innovation.

Responsibilities

• Communicate architectural decisions, plans, goals, and strategies, while highlighting short-term trade-offs vs. long-term commitments and costs.
• Engage in and improve the end-to-end lifecycle of services, starting from inception & design, deployment, and operations.
• Establish automation capabilities leveraging cloud-native solutions to improve the developer experience.
• Support activities, including system design consulting, developing software platforms and frameworks, capacity planning, and launch reviews.
• Troubleshoot difficult issues and engage with customers.
• Learn new AWS services and other technologies as required.
• Improve systems scalability and sustainability leveraging automation to enhance reliability and velocity.
• Participate in enterprise cloud transformation and migration efforts.
• Guide customers on using cloud-native design and architecture patterns.
• Provide consultation on technology infrastructure planning and engineering for assigned systems; assess the implications of technology strategies on infrastructure capabilities.
• Establish strategies to migrate legacy applications by converting them to multiple microservices and hosting on AWS Cloud platform.
• Leverage cloud-native architecture components including containers, immutable infrastructure, microservices, and service mesh to build highly available and fault-tolerant applications.
• Conduct research on global technology trends and their applicability to FEPOC products in support of internal development teams and business initiatives.
• Promote and ensure modern application design, applying engineering best practices in the development and operations lifecycle while mitigating vulnerabilities.
• Monitor and manage the stability, availability, and performance of enterprise systems and platforms across IT domains (e.g., systems, network, storage, security) by analyzing systems to identify problems, trends, and opportunities for improvement.
• Automate the end-to-end process to maintain (patches and upgrades) of our AWS Cloud ecosystem.
• Make data-driven recommendations and decisions to continuously improve the overall efficacy and efficiency of our software delivery capabilities.
• Mentor peers and engage with others across teams to socialize solutions.

Requirements

• Minimum of 10 years of IT experience, of which at least 5 years must be in AWS Cloud Platform engineering and administration.
• Strong leadership experience with driving transformation initiatives.
• 3-5 years of experience in a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) role with experience in SRE principles and transformation.
• 3+ years of experience with containerization (Kubernetes), cloud technologies (AWS, Azure, etc.), DevOps toolchain (Ansible, Jenkins, Artifactory, Bitbucket, etc.), and technical patterns (IaC, automated provisioning/release, CI/CD, etc.).
• Solid understanding of software coding techniques and experience with the full spectrum of software engineering (build, integration, test, releasing, and deployment) leveraging Python.
• Experience developing and/or challenging engineering solutions/practices and collaborating with peers within and outside of the immediate team, including customers (developers, architects, engineers).
• Platform engineering lead with hands-on experience building robust middleware environments.
• Previous Linux system administration experience is required.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of AWS platform and services including but not limited to VPC, networking, Direct Connect, subnets, NACLs, security groups, EC2, S3, IAM, ELBs, Lambda, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, EKS, etc.
• Hands-on current implementation and production-level experience in AWS Cloud.
• Hands-on experience with automation and infrastructure provisioning; goal is to provision infrastructure only with code and policy as code.
• Familiarity with Terraform automation, Ansible playbooks, and Python code.
• Experience with AWS CloudFormation and CDK is required.
• Hands-on experience in writing Lambda functions, preferably in Python (Boto3).
• Proficiency in writing Linux Bash scripts.
• Minimum of one AWS certification is required.
• Hands-on experience with containerization and Amazon EKS is a big plus.
• Great understanding of various DevOps toolchains, including Git/repo, Crucible, Jenkins, etc.
• Solid understanding and experience with a CI/CD toolchain.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of overall experience in IT, including hands-on development and systems engineering background.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, or related field; master’s degree preferred.
• 5-10 years of experience in cloud engineering and automation, with a focus on AWS cloud services.
• Minimum of 8-10 years of IT experience, of which at least 5 years must be in AWS Cloud automation and administration.
• 3-5 years of experience in a Site Reliability Engineering role.
• 3+ years of experience with implementation of containerization (Kubernetes), cloud technologies (AWS, Azure, or Google, etc.), DevOps toolchain (Jenkins, Artifactory, Bitbucket, etc.), and technical patterns (IaC, automated provisioning/release, CI/CD, etc.).
• Well-versed in Terraform automation, Ansible playbooks, and Python code.
• In-depth knowledge of AWS services and solutions, including but not limited to EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, VPC, IAM, CloudFormation, and CloudWatch.
• Strong understanding of cloud architecture principles, design patterns, and best practices for building scalable, resilient, and secure cloud environments.
• Proficiency in infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.
• Exposure to artificial intelligence patterns, machine learning, and engineering of AWS solutions.
• Good knowledge of leveraging Amazon Kendra, SageMaker, Lambda, Bedrock, RAG models, etc.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and leadership skills, with the ability to effectively interact with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Minimum of 1 AWS certification (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer).
• Experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment preferred.
• Solid understanding of software coding techniques and hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), and serverless computing is a plus.
• Full spectrum of software engineering (build, integration, test, releasing, and deployment) leveraging Python.

Skills

• Development: Experience programming with one or more languages: Python, Java, Groovy, Go, etc.
• IAC Tools for Platform Automation: Strong skills and experience in at least one: Ansible, Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, CDK.
• Containers: Docker or other OCI-certified containers is a plus.
• Container Orchestration Platform: Experience with Kubernetes, AWS EKS, AWS ECS is a plus.
• CNI Plugins: Calico, Flannel, Weave Net, etc.
• Service Mesh: Istio, AWS App Mesh, OpenShift Service Mesh, etc.
• Container Security Tools: Twistlock, Sysdig, Aqua, etc. is a plus.
• Platform Monitoring, Observability, & Performance Tools: Nginx, New Relic, AppDynamics, Datadog, Thanos, Jaeger, LogDNA, etc.
• DevOps Tools: Git/Repo, Crucible, Bitbucket, Jira, Ansible, Puppet, Jenkins, ArgoCD, Bamboo, Maven, Artifactory, Nexus, etc.
• Other Required Skills:
  • Understanding of cloud-native architecture.
  • Linux, shell scripting, and general admin skills.
  • Network, security, plugins, & storage skills.
  • AWS skills: EC2, S3, EBS, EFS, IAM, VPC, Lambda, etc.
  • Cloud and DevOps certifications, e.g., AWS.
• Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs):
  • Knowledge of programming languages and web-based technologies.
  • Ability to collaborate to solve technical problems across teams.
  • Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.
  • Must immediately disclose any debarment, exclusion, or other event that makes them ineligible to perform work directly or indirectly on federal health care programs.
  • Ability to work in a fast-paced environment with frequently changing priorities, deadlines, and workloads that can be variable for long periods of time.
  • Ability to meet established deadlines and handle multiple customer service demands from internal and external customers, within set expectations for service excellence.
  • Ability to effectively communicate and provide positive customer service to every internal and external customer, including customers who may be demanding or otherwise challenging.

Licenses/Certifications

• AWS Cloud certifications; minimum of one is required.
• FinOps certification is a plus.