Sr. AWS Cloud - Cyber Range Engineer

About the role

ECS is seeking a Senior AWS Cloud / Cyber Range Engineer to join our team in Arlington, VA (Hybrid) supporting the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) Technical Engineering and Support Services (TESS) program. You will support the operation, maintenance, security, and modernization of a federal cybersecurity training environment, providing hands‑on engineering for a cloud‑hosted Cybersecurity Virtual Learning Environment (CVLE) used to deliver interactive cybersecurity labs and training. Initially you will work alongside the existing support team to learn the environment, architecture, security boundary, operational processes, and lab ecosystem, then assume primary responsibility for day‑to‑day engineering, operation, availability, security, and continuous improvement of the environment.

Responsibilities

• Operate, maintain, troubleshoot, and optimize an AWS‑hosted cybersecurity training and virtual lab environment.
• Assume primary engineering responsibility for the platform following completion of the transition and knowledge‑transfer period.
• Maintain availability and reliability of infrastructure supporting cybersecurity training courses, instructors, administrators, and students.
• Manage AWS infrastructure, including compute, networking, storage, identity and access management, monitoring, and security services.
• Develop, maintain, test, and deploy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and other virtual lab components.
• Support development of new cybersecurity lab environments and promote approved lab images from development into production.
• Manage provisioning and deprovisioning of virtual machines and student lab environments.
• Develop automation to reduce manual configuration, environment setup, reset, provisioning, and administrative activities.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code and configuration‑management practices where appropriate.
• Monitor platform health, capacity, performance, security, and availability and troubleshoot infrastructure or application‑support issues.
• Maintain the cybersecurity posture of the environment and support continued Authority to Operate (ATO) requirements.
• Identify and remediate Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEVs), critical/high vulnerabilities, security findings, and other government security requirements.
• Support POA&M remediation and provide technical evidence or documentation necessary to demonstrate implementation of security controls.
• Coordinate with cybersecurity training developers, course owners, vendors, security personnel, and government stakeholders.
• Document platform architecture, operational procedures, configurations, dependencies, troubleshooting procedures, and engineering decisions.
• Identify opportunities to improve platform scalability, resilience, automation, cost efficiency, maintainability, and security.

Requirements

• US citizenship with ability to obtain and maintain Public Trust Suitability.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Cybersecurity, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Approximately 8+ years of relevant infrastructure, cloud, systems, or platform engineering experience.
• At least 4+ years of hands‑on AWS engineering or operations experience.
• Demonstrated experience operating production AWS environments.
• Strong experience with AWS services such as EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, CloudWatch, EBS, security groups, load balancing, and related cloud infrastructure services.
• Experience creating, maintaining, hardening, and deploying Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).
• Experience with Windows and Linux server administration.
• Experience supporting virtual machines, virtualized environments, or dynamically provisioned infrastructure.
• Experience with scripting and automation using tools such as Python, PowerShell, Bash, or Ansible.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or equivalent.
• Demonstrated experience troubleshooting complex cloud infrastructure and application‑hosting issues.
• Working knowledge of cloud security, vulnerability management, patching, logging, monitoring, and configuration management.
• Experience working within federal cybersecurity requirements or other highly regulated environments.
• Ability to independently manage a technical environment while collaborating effectively with engineering, security, training, and government stakeholders.

Skills

• Previous experience supporting cyber ranges, cybersecurity training environments, virtual labs, sandboxes, simulation environments, or technical learning platforms.
• Experience supporting an LMS‑integrated training environment, including Moodle or similar platforms.
• Experience with federal ATO/RMF processes, security controls, POA&Ms, vulnerability remediation, and continuous monitoring.
• Familiarity with CISA cybersecurity requirements, including remediation of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEVs).
• Experience designing automated provisioning and teardown of temporary or on‑demand cloud environments.
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure or virtual‑machine image deployment.
• Experience optimizing AWS environments for cost, scalability, availability, and operational efficiency.
• Experience supporting cloud environments with multiple development and production boundaries.
• Experience working directly with federal customers and contractor/vendor teams.
• One or more of the following certifications would be beneficial:
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate or Professional
  • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
  • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
  • AWS Certified Security – Specialty
  • Security+
  • CISSP or equivalent cybersecurity certification

Pay

Salary Range: $165,000 - $190,000