Application Cloud Engineer

Description Remote Our client seeks an Application Cloud Engineer to maintain and enhance AWS-based applications and infrastructure. The role collaborates with development, operations, and security teams to ensure scalability, performance, and security. The engineer participates in on-call rotations to support 24/7 production systems and incident response.

Due to federal security clearance requirements, applicant must be a United States Citizen or Permanent Resident with an active Public Trust clearance. Due to client requirements, applicants must be willing and able to work on a w2 basis. For our w2 consultants, we offer a great benefits package that includes Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits, 401k with company matching, and life insurance. Rate: $65.00 to $70.00/hr. w2

Responsibilities

• Provision and manage AWS infrastructure using IaC tools such as Terraform.
• Manage Amazon EKS including cluster provisioning, upgrades, and node groups.
• Configure EKS networking including VPC CNI, security groups for pods, and ALB/NLB ingress controllers.
• Administer Kubernetes objects including deployments, services, configmaps, secrets, and RBAC.
• Monitor and troubleshoot production systems using CloudWatch and related observability tools.
• Containerize and deploy applications using ECS and Lambda.
• Deploy across dev, staging, and prod environments to ensure consistency and stability.
• Monitor deployments and system health using CloudWatch and other tools.
• Troubleshoot deployment issues and improve pipeline performance and reliability.
• Perform daily health checks using AWS CLI or scheduled Lambda scripts and log/report results.
• Collaborate with development and DevOps teams to ensure stateless and fault-tolerant applications.
• Implement enhancements to ECS environments focusing on scalability, performance, and observability.
• Improve container orchestration with auto-scaling, rolling deployments, and upgrades.
• Support feature branch testing, merge request validation, and artifact promotion workflows.
• Enforce pipeline security and compliance through automated code scanning and approval gates.
• Remediate OS-level, container, and dependency vulnerabilities.
• Orchestrate failover and restoration of ECS/EKS services, Lambda functions, databases, and related components.
• Test and document regional failover playbooks and recovery runbooks.
• Meet RTO and RPO requirements.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues across cloud services, containers, databases, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Follow and improve incident response playbooks, escalation procedures, and communications.
• Automate operational tasks and improve alert accuracy to reduce on-call fatigue.
• Log incidents, changes, and operational metrics in tracking systems.

Experience Requirements

• Minimum of 8 years with BS/BA, or 6 years with MS/MA, or 3 years with PhD, or 12 years with HS Diploma/equivalent.
• 3 years of IT experience.
• Hands-on AWS experience with cloud deployment strategies.
• Familiarity with image registries such as Amazon ECR and CI/CD pipelines for containers.
• Proficiency with Python, Bash, YAML/JSON, Node.js, and Lambda functions.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD tools and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of disaster recovery planning and implementation.
• AWS or relevant cloud certifications such as AWS DevOps Engineer or Solutions Architect Associate.
• Understanding of cloud architecture, autoscaling, and load balancing.
• Proficiency with monitoring, alerting, and logging tools.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Analytical and problem-solving skills.
• US citizenship and eligibility to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance.
• Preferred: Familiarity with Docker, ECS, Kubernetes, and ITIL or incident management frameworks.

Education Requirements