Staff Cloud Engineer (Contract-to-Hire)

Location: Scottsdale, AZ (preferred) | San Francisco, CA | Chicago, IL
Work Model: Hybrid (3 days onsite)

• Contract Length: 12 months (strong conversion potential)
• Compensation: $90–$95/hour
• Work Authorization: Must be authorized to work in the U.S. (no sponsorship available)

About the Role

Join a leading organization at the center of the U.S. financial ecosystem, powering secure, real-time payments used by hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses every day.

As a Staff Cloud Engineer, you’ll help modernize and scale cloud infrastructure supporting critical payment platforms. You’ll work at the intersection of cloud architecture, platform engineering, and security/compliance, driving solutions that operate at national scale and high reliability.

This is a 12-month contract with strong potential to convert full-time.

What You’ll Do

Lead Cloud Architecture

• Design and implement scalable, secure, and highly available AWS-based systems
• Define architecture patterns and standards used across multiple engineering teams
• Solve complex, open-ended technical challenges at scale

Drive Cloud Modernization

• Support migration of large-scale systems from on-prem environments to AWS
• Build resilient systems with strong fault tolerance, observability, and performance

Strengthen Security & Compliance

• Partner with audit teams to address findings and implement improvements
• Design systems aligned with security, risk, and compliance frameworks (e.g., SOC 2)
• Ensure systems meet strict requirements for reliability, auditability, and data protection

Build Internal Platforms & Tooling

• Lead Infrastructure as Code (IaC) initiatives using Terraform and similar tools
• Create reusable infrastructure components, APIs, and deployment pipelines
• Improve the developer experience by simplifying and standardizing cloud infrastructure

Collaborate & Influence

• Work cross-functionally with engineering, product, and security teams
• Drive alignment on technical decisions across multiple teams
• Act as a key contributor to long-term cloud strategy

Operate at Scale

• Troubleshoot complex distributed system issues in production
• Improve monitoring, alerting, and system reliability
• Continuously elevate engineering practices and standards

What You Bring

Core Experience

• 8+ years of experience in cloud engineering, distributed systems, or platform engineering
• Strong expertise in AWS (compute, networking, storage, security, observability)
• Experience designing highly scalable, resilient systems

Technical Skills

• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar)
• Kubernetes (EKS or equivalent) and containerized environments
• CI/CD pipeline design and automation
• Strong understanding of networking, DNS, HTTP, TLS, and load balancing

Architecture & Leadership

• Experience owning and driving technical architecture across teams
• Ability to influence decisions without direct authority
• Proven track record building systems used by multiple engineering teams

Development Background

• Strong foundation in backend development (Java/Spring or similar)
• Ability to debug and support application-layer issues when needed

Preferred Experience

• Work in regulated or high-security environments
• Exposure to audit processes or SOC 2 controls
• Experience with event-driven systems (Kafka, messaging frameworks)
• FinTech or payments systems experience
• Cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, or similar)

What Success Looks Like

• Deliver secure, scalable cloud solutions supporting critical financial systems
• Improve system reliability, performance, and compliance posture
• Enable engineering teams through better infrastructure, tooling, and standards
• Influence cloud strategy and make a measurable impact across the organization

Why Join

• Work on high-impact systems that power real-time financial transactions nationwide
• Help shape the future of a modern cloud platform at scale
• Operate at a staff engineering level, influencing architecture and direction
• Collaborate with talented teams focused on innovation, security, and reliability