Senior Cloud Engineer

Senior Cloud Engineer: Job Description

Employment Type: Contract W2 only
Experience: 10+ years in IT, with at least 5+ years in cloud engineering

We are looking for a Senior Cloud Engineer to design, build, and operate secure, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud infrastructure. You will be a technical leader on the team, setting standards for architecture and automation, mentoring engineers, and partnering with development, security, and operations teams to deliver reliable platforms at scale.

Architecture and Design

• Design and implement highly available, fault-tolerant, multi-region cloud architectures on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform
• Lead cloud migration and modernization initiatives, including lift-and-shift, re-platforming, and re-architecting to cloud-native services
• Define reference architectures, landing zones, and best practices for the organization
• Evaluate new cloud services and recommend adoption based on technical and business fit

Automation and Infrastructure as Code

• Build and maintain infrastructure using Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, or Pulumi
• Develop and improve CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, ArgoCD)
• Automate provisioning, configuration, patching, and operational tasks using Python, Bash, or PowerShell

Containers and Platform Engineering

• Design, deploy, and manage Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE) and containerized workloads
• Implement service mesh, ingress, autoscaling, and workload-optimization strategies
• Support developer self-service through internal platforms and golden paths

Security and Compliance

• Implement cloud security best practices: IAM, network segmentation, encryption, secrets management, and zero-trust principles
• Partner with security teams on vulnerability management, audits, and compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR as applicable)
• Enforce policy-as-code and guardrails (OPA, AWS Config, Azure Policy)

Reliability and Operations

• Own observability: monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, ELK, OpenTelemetry)
• Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets; drive incident response, root cause analysis, and postmortems
• Design and test disaster recovery and backup strategies
• Participate in on-call rotation for critical production systems

Cost Optimization (FinOps)

• Monitor and optimize cloud spend through right-sizing, reserved capacity, and savings plans
• Implement tagging, budgeting, and cost-visibility practices

Leadership and Collaboration

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers; conduct design and code reviews
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and security stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions
• Produce clear documentation, runbooks, and architecture decision records (ADRs)

• 10+ years of overall IT experience, including 5+ years hands-on with public cloud platforms
• Deep expertise in at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform); working knowledge of a second
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred)
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker in production
• Solid understanding of networking: VPC/VNet design, DNS, load balancing, VPN, Direct Connect/ExpressRoute, firewalls
• Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language (Python, Go, or Bash)
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• Strong knowledge of IAM, security best practices, and compliance frameworks
• Experience with monitoring and observability tooling
• Proven track record of leading complex cloud projects end to end
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders