Sr. AWS infra engineer

Sr. AWS Infra Engineer

Location:

either Dallas, Texas or Columbus, Ohio or Minneapolis, Minnesota

Onsite: 4 days a week

Interview process:
Spark Hire, then video interview, then face to face (MUST FACE TO FACE IN ANY OF THOSE MARKETS AS THE TEAM SITS ALL OVER)

Rate: $65/hr on W-2

Contract:

6 months to perm (client does not sponsor unfortunately)

Must have: AWS, Kubernetes, Lambdas, EC2, CI/CD experience, Terraform, Athena, Glue

What we need:

• An engineer who has spent the majority of their career building, operating, and maintaining cloud infrastructure on AWS — not just using cloud services for data processing.

• Hands-on Kubernetes administration: deploying clusters, managing nodes, networking (ingress, CNI), RBAC, persistent storage, and troubleshooting production issues.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code - primarily Terraform - to provision and manage AWS resources programmatically

• CI/CD pipeline ownership: building and maintaining pipelines using Azure Dev Ops or equivalent tools

• Security-first mindset: IAM policies, security groups, VPCs, audit logging, vulnerability remediation within SLAs

• Ability to support Data Science and AI/ML platform infrastructure (e.g., Shakudo on EKS, SAS Viya on Kubernetes) not build the models, but run the platform they sit on.

• Experience with AWS services: EKS, ECR, Sage Maker (infra layer), Lambda, Athena, Glue - specifically managing and operating them, not just calling APIs from notebooks

• Database infrastructure support:
Athena, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres — connection management, performance, security, not DBA-level tuning.

What we DON’T need:

• A Data Scientist or ML Engineer who has 'used AWS' - we need infrastructure operators, not model builders.

• A Data Engineer who knows Spark, Glue jobs, or ETL pipelines — that is not this role

• A Cloud Developer who writes Lambda functions or application code — we need platform engineers.

• Anyone whose primary Kubernetes experience is running kubectl commands in a managed service without understanding the underlying cluster architecture.

• Candidates who list 'Kubernetes' on their resume but cannot explain what a Daemon Set, Ingress controller, or Persistent Volume Claim  is.

• Candidates with AWS certifications but no hands-on production infrastructure experience.

What will this platform engineers do in my team:

This is a Platform Engineering role embedded in the Data Science division. The team runs critical data and AI/ML infrastructure on AWS, including Shakudo (a data science platform), SAS Viya - all running on Kubernetes (EKS). The engineer's job is to keep that infrastructure running, secure, scalable, and automated.

Day-to-Day

Responsibilities Include:

• Manage and operate AWS EKS clusters that host Shakudo and SAS Viya — currently supporting 25+ active prototypes, growing to 60+ by end of 2026.

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using Azure Dev Ops for deploying data science environments and platform updates

• Provision and manage AWS infrastructure using Terraform - VPCs, EKS node groups, IAM roles, ECR, RDS instances.

• Manage container image lifecycle via Amazon ECR - building, versioning, scanning for vulnerabilities.

• Set up and maintain AWS accounts for the Data Science platform, including IAM, cost controls, and security guardrails.

• Respond to infrastructure incidents within SLA - on-call rotation, root cause analysis, post-mortems.

• Perform Kubernetes cluster upgrades, node patching, and security remediation.

• Support Data Scientists by unblocking infrastructure issues - not writing their code, but ensuring their compute and storage works.

• Conduct knowledge transfer sessions within the platform team - documentation, runbooks, workshops

• Collaborate with Network, Database, Architecture, and Security teams.