Senior Cloud Engineer II

Description

Job Title:

Senior Cloud Engineer – Cloud Engineer SME (Platform SME)

Location:

Hybrid - 2 days a week on-site - Suitland, MDSalary:  ,000

Position Overview We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Cloud Engineer / Cloud Engineer Subject Matter Expert (SME) to serve as the senior technical implementation lead for designing, building, and operationalizing secure, scalable AWS cloud environments supporting modernization of complex, interdependent systems.

This role requires deep AWS engineering expertise, strong Python development skills, and hands-on experience assessing legacy environments and planning phased cloud migrations. The Cloud Engineer SME will work closely with the Systems Architect, Technical Program Manager, application teams, and data engineering teams to translate modernization strategy into deployable cloud solutions.

This is not a traditional infrastructure-only role. The ideal candidate must be able to analyze legacy systems, assess dependencies and migration risks, evaluate modernization approaches, and implement cloud-native solutions aligned with enterprise architecture, security, governance, and migration sequencing requirements.

This is a hybrid position based in Washington, DC Metro Area. U.S. Citizenship is required.

Key Responsibilities Participate in structured discovery and assessment of legacy applications, infrastructure, dependencies, integrations, batch processes, and data flows.

Document current-state architectures, system inventories, cloud readiness gaps, modernization constraints, and technical dependencies.

Evaluate workloads using the 7 Rs migration framework and provide technical input into migration roadmaps, sequencing, and modernization waves.

Design and implement secure, scalable, highly available AWS cloud environments.

Develop and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) using Terraform, Cloud Formation, or equivalent technologies.

Establish repeatable cloud environment patterns for development, testing, staging, and production.

Implement AWS networking, IAM, encryption, resiliency, backup, disaster recovery, and security controls.

Develop production-quality Python solutions including serverless functions, automation utilities, orchestration scripts, data transformation tools, and validation services.

Support modernization and refactoring of legacy Python applications and establish reusable cloud-native development patterns.

Implement AWS services including Lambda, ECS/EKS, Fargate, Glue, Aurora/PostgreSQL, S3, and AWS Batch.

Evaluate serverless, containerized, and managed-service architectures based on performance, scalability, cost, and workload requirements.

Design and implement CI/CD pipelines incorporating automated builds, testing, security scanning, quality controls, and deployment automation.

Automate cloud provisioning and deployments to ensure reproducible and version-controlled environments.

Implement monitoring, logging, alerting, observability, performance baselines, and capacity thresholds.

Support load testing, scalability validation, operational readiness, and development of runbooks.

Identify and mitigate integration risks across interdependent applications and cloud environments.

Collaborate with application, infrastructure, cybersecurity, architecture, and data engineering teams to maintain consistent cloud implementation patterns.

Support architecture reviews, security assessments, ATO readiness, audit activities, and governance requirements.

Maintain traceable technical documentation and auditable deployment records.

Required Qualifications 8+ years of experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, application modernization, or related technical disciplines.
5+ years of hands-on experience designing and implementing solutions in AWS.Strong hands-on experience with AWS networking, compute, storage, security, database, container, and serverless services.

Advanced Python development experience with production-quality coding, testing, logging, modular design, and secure development practices.

Experience developing Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform, Cloud Formation, or similar technologies.

Experience assessing legacy applications and infrastructure for cloud migration and modernization.

Understanding of the 7 Rs migration framework, workload migration strategies, and phased modernization approaches.

Experience designing and implementing CI/CD and Dev Sec Ops  pipelines.

Strong understanding of containers, serverless computing, managed services, and cloud-native…