AWS CLOUD ENGINEER

AWS Cloud Engineer 6+ Month Contract to hire Location in Dallas, Las Vegas, Atlanta or Chicago Hybrid: Onsite 3 days a week Summary: The Cloud Engineer is a hands-on role focused on building and operating Client’s AWS platform, with limited transitional work on legacy Azure workloads as we wind down that estate. You will implement Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), automate CI/CD (GitHub Actions), support containerized and serverless workloads (ECS/Fargate/EKS/Lambda), and contribute to migrations using AWS 5R strategies and modernization patterns. You’ll collaborate with senior engineers, SREs, and application teams to deliver secure, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure while steadily improving developer experience. Essential Duties & Responsibilities: • Lead and contribute to wave-based migrations using AWS 5R strategies and app modernization patterns; apply multi-account landing zone/reference architectures (Organizations/Control Tower) and partner with application owners on safe cutovers across EC2, RDS/Aurora, API Gateway, ECS/Fargate/EKS, and serverless services. • Build and maintain a Terraform-first platform (reusable modules, state strategy, policy-as-code, tagging); create GitHub Actions pipelines and golden-path templates for build/test/scan/deploy; enforce drift remediation and environment promotion to improve developer experience. • Operate container and serverless runtimes (ECR, ECS/Fargate, EKS, Lambda, API Gateway); standardize image build and deployment patterns (blue/green/canary, autoscaling/HPA) and support data services (RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache) with backup/restore and performance basics. • Implement least-privilege IAM, KMS, WAF, and Secrets Manager baselines; integrate Security Hub/GuardDuty/Inspector findings into response workflows; maintain tagging, guardrails (SCPs), and auditability to meet policy and regulatory requirements. • Define SLIs/SLOs and build actionable monitoring, logging, and tracing using CloudWatch metrics/logs/alarms and X-Ray (and approved third-party tools); contribute to runbooks, on-call practices, and post-incident reviews that drive reliability improvements (MTTR/MTBF). • Design resilient networking for multi-VPC estates (subnets, routing, security groups/NACLs, ALB/NLB, PrivateLink, NAT, Transit Gateway) with secure hybrid connectivity (Direct Connect/VPN) and DNS patterns (Route 53) supporting private service access and cross-account architectures. • Apply FinOps practices: right-size resources, implement autoscaling, plan Savings Plans/Reserved Instances, and configure budget/anomaly alerts; maintain accurate cloud asset/configuration data in ServiceNow CMDB; participate in change/incident/problem processes and a reasonable on-call rotation. • Nice-to-have: Explore the use, design, and deployment of AI agents to enhance DevEx and operations—leveraging AWS Bedrock (including Agents for Bedrock), Lambda, Step Functions, and retrieval via Kendra/OpenSearch—while monitoring accuracy, latency, and cost. Education & Experience: We’re targeting a strong hands-on engineer with solid AWS fundamentals and platform automation skills. Ideal profile: • Bachelor’s degree preferred; High School Diploma or Equivalent with relevant experience required. • 3–5 years of cloud/platform/DevOps engineering experience with an AWS focus (compute, networking, IAM, storage). • Proficiency with Terraform (modules, state, CI integration) and Git/GitHub; experience with GitHub Actions or similar CI/CD. • Docker image lifecycle and registry management; Linux fundamentals and scripting (Bash and/or Python). • Hands-on with at least two of: ECS/Fargate, EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB. • Practical CloudWatch/X-Ray usage (logs, metrics, alarms, traces) and familiarity with incident response/runbooks. • Security fundamentals (least-privilege IAM, KMS, WAF, Secrets Manager), tagging discipline, and FinOps basics. • Azure familiarity (AKS, Key Vault, Firewall, Sentinel, Monitor) is helpful during the near-term exit but not core. Certificates, Licenses, Registrations: • AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Associate, SysOps, or Developer) preferred; AWS DevOps Pro/Security a plus. • Kubernetes certifications (CKA/CKAD) or Docker certifications are a plus. • Azure certifications are optional and considered a plus during the transition. Tools & Technologies You’ll Use: • AWS: EC2, ECS/Fargate, EKS, ECR, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, S3, CloudFront, Route 53, ALB/NLB, IAM, KMS, WAF, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch/X-Ray, Organizations/Control Tower. • IaC/CI: Terraform (primary), CloudFormation (as needed), GitHub/GitHub Actions, policy-as-code. • Scripting/OS/Containers: Linux, Bash/Python, Docker. • Networking: VPC, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect/VPN, PrivateLink, DNS. • ITSM/Observability/FinOps: ServiceNow, CloudWatch, Cost Explorer/Savings Plans/RI planning.