AWS Cloud Engineer

Description

The company needs an AWS Cloud Engineer to support the NIAID team in Rockville, MD.

The role covers the full delivery lifecycle, from AWS infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines to developer tooling and administration of the Windows Server, Active Directory and SQL Server estate.

You will own infrastructure design on your own, set technical direction, and mentor junior engineers.

You must obtain and maintain a Public Trust. This requires onsite fingerprinting at a designated facility and an investigation that may review personal and criminal history, financial conduct, foreign influence and other adjudications.

Clearance level currently held: none. Clearance level that must be obtainable: none. Public Trust/Other required: NACLC (T3). Job family: IT Infrastructure and Operations.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain highly available AWS environments that are reliable, perform well and cost little to run.
• Build and manage infrastructure as code in Terraform, including reusable modules and pipelines.
• Write automation tools, scripts and small internal applications in PowerShell, Python or similar to speed up provisioning, configuration and operations.
• Build developer tooling, internal APIs and self-service features that help teams ship faster.
• Administer Windows Server, tuning performance and finding root causes.
• Administer Active Directory: AD DS, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, certificate services, and integration with AWS Managed Microsoft AD.
• Administer Microsoft SQL Server on EC2 and RDS, covering backup and recovery, high availability and performance tuning.
• Help move Windows and SQL Server workloads from on-premises to AWS.
• Monitor system health with Datadog and CloudWatch, lead incident response, and keep runbooks current and reliability improving.
• Act as the escalation point for complex incidents and lead their root cause analysis.
• Maintain backup and disaster recovery configurations and take part in restore testing.
• Plan capacity, optimise cost and apply resource tagging.
• Write technical documentation and mentor junior engineers.
• Use AI-assisted engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude or AWS Kiro to speed up IaC work and troubleshooting.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree and 4+ years of relevant IT experience, or an equivalent mix of education and experience.
• Experience owning cloud infrastructure design and setting technical direction on complex initiatives.
• Experience turning customer and stakeholder needs into working technical solutions.
• Hands-on AWS experience across compute, storage, networking, databases, IAM, backup and monitoring.
• Experience with Terraform, CloudFormation or CDK for infrastructure as code.
• Strong software development background, able to build automation tools, internal services or lightweight applications, not only admin scripts.
• Strong PowerShell skills and working proficiency in Python.
• Deep Windows Server engineering experience, including root cause analysis of complex problems.
• Experience administering Active Directory: AD DS, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, certificate services and enterprise authentication.
• Experience administering SQL Server, including backup and recovery, high availability and RDS administration.
• Solid understanding of AWS networking: VPC, routing, security groups, load balancing and hybrid connectivity.
• Experience with observability and incident response using Datadog, CloudWatch or similar tools.
• Experience supporting production systems under formal change control.
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to explain technical solutions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Preferred: AWS Certified Solutions Architect or DevOps Engineer certification.
• Preferred: Microsoft Windows Server or Azure certification.
• Preferred: Experience with containers and orchestration (Docker, ECS or EKS).
• Preferred: Experience building internal APIs or full stack applications, front end and back end.
• Preferred: Experience with AI/ML services (Bedrock, SageMaker) or AI-assisted engineering tools.
• Preferred: Experience with AWS multi-account and landing zone patterns (Organizations, Control Tower, IAM Identity Center).
• Preferred: Familiarity with FinOps, cost optimisation and tagging strategies.
• Preferred: Experience with on-premises to AWS migrations.
• Preferred: Experience in federal, healthcare or regulated environments (FISMA, FedRAMP).
• Certifications: none required.
• Experience: 4+ years of related experience.
• US citizenship required: No.

Conditions

Location: Rockville, MD, USA.

Hybrid work with 3 days onsite per week in Rockville, MD.

Full-time, 40 scheduled hours per week.

No travel required.

Salary is likely to fall between $124,093 and $135,700. This is not a guarantee: pay depends on experience, geographic location and possibly contract terms, and may fall outside this range.

Candidates will complete an identity verification process using biometrics and AI, and must be on camera for virtual interviews.

Equal opportunity employer, including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.

Benefits

• Medical plan options, some with Health Savings Accounts, plus dental and vision plans for US-based employees.
• 401(k) with pre-tax and post-tax contributions up to IRS limits and a company match.
• Full flex work weeks where possible, and paid time off including vacation, sick and personal time, holidays, paid parental, military, bereavement and jury duty leave.
• Short and long-term disability, life, accidental death and dismemberment, personal accident, critical illness, and business travel and accident insurance, provided or available.