AWS Cloud Data Platform Administrator

Job Title:

AWS Cloud Data Platform Administrator.

Location:

Raritan, NJ (On-site – 4 days per week).

Employment Type:

Contract (W2 through Zip Staff — No C2C or 1099).

About the Opportunity:
Zip Staff is seeking an experienced AWS Cloud Data Platform Administrator to manage, secure, automate, and optimize enterprise-grade data platforms hosted on AWS for a global technology services firm.

The role is accountable for platform availability, performance, governance, cost efficiency, and operational excellence across data engineering, analytics, and integration services.

The ideal candidate brings strong AWS administration expertise, hands‑on experience with modern data platforms, and a proven ability to support business‑critical workloads in production environments. This is an on‑site role in Raritan, NJ (4 days per week in the office).

• Administer and support AWS-based data platforms across development, test, staging, and production environments.
• Manage services such as Amazon S3, Redshift, RDS/Aurora, Glue, EMR, Athena, Lake Formation, Kinesis, Lambda, DMS, Step Functions, and Cloud Watch.
• Provision and configure cloud resources using infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, AWS Cloud Formation, or AWS CDK.
• Implement identity and access controls using IAM roles, policies, permission boundaries, AWS Organizations, and service control policies.
• Monitor platform health, capacity, job execution, data pipelines, storage, and query performance; proactively identify and resolve issues.
• Perform incident, problem, change, release, and service‑request management in accordance with defined SLAs and ITIL practices.
• Optimize Redshift clusters, Spark/EMR workloads, storage tiers, data transfer, and compute consumption for performance and cost.
• Implement backup, recovery, high‑availability, business‑continuity, and disaster‑recovery controls; conduct periodic restoration and failover tests.
• Secure data using encryption, key management, private networking, secrets management, logging, vulnerability remediation, and least‑privilege access.
• Enable data governance through cataloging, lineage, classification, access auditing, retention, and lifecycle‑management controls.
• Build operational automation using Python, Shell scripting, AWS CLI, SDKs, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Maintain platform standards, runbooks, architecture diagrams, configuration records, SOPs, troubleshooting guides, and audit evidence.
• Partner with data engineers, architects, security teams, application teams, Fin Ops, and business stakeholders on onboarding, migrations, upgrades, and capacity planning.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor junior administrators, coordinate vendor support, and drive root‑cause analysis and continuous improvement.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• 7+ years of overall experience in cloud infrastructure, data platform administration, database administration, or data engineering operations.
• At least 4 years of hands‑on experience supporting AWS environments, including production data and analytics workloads.
• Strong hands‑on administration experience with AWS data analytics, compute, storage, networking, security, and monitoring services.
• Deep understanding of data lake, data warehouse, lakehouse, batch‑processing, and streaming architectures.
• Experience administering Amazon Redshift (workload management, query tuning, distribution and sort strategies, scaling, snapshots, and security).
• Experience with AWS Glue (Data Catalog, crawlers, jobs, workflows) and Lake Formation permissions.
• Working knowledge of Apache Spark and Amazon EMR administration, troubleshooting, scaling, and performance tuning.
• Strong knowledge of Amazon S3 design…