AWS Architect || Chevy Chase, MD (Onsite Only)

Job Role: AWS Architect

Location: Chevy Chase, MD (Onsite Only)

Hiring- Long-Term Contract

Job Description:

You will serve as the chief technical authority for our enterprise AWS cloud ecosystem, setting the architectural standard for multi-account governance, high-performance scientific networking, infrastructure security, and automation. In this role, you will collaborate closely with platform engineering, IT security, and specialized research and analytics capabilities (including Science, AI Accelerator, and Investment teams) to design and operate resilient, secure, and scalable cloud foundations. You will hold core accountability for our landing zone architecture, compute and data substrates, hybrid enterprise connectivity, and operational reliability.

Key Responsibilities

• Multi-Account Governance & Landing Zone: Architect, evolve, and maintain the AWS Organizations multi-account structure, driving automated account vending, Service Control Policies (SCPs), and sandbox guardrails.
• Advanced Cloud Networking: Design and manage resilient hybrid network architectures, including Direct Connect, active VPC routing, Transit Gateways, AWS PrivateLink, Route 53 DNS, NAT/Internet Gateways, and Application/Network Load Balancers.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Leadership: Drive end-to-end IaC automation utilizing Terraform and AWS CloudFormation. Lead infrastructure-level CI/CD pipelines, define repository standards, and serve as the primary reviewer and approver for cloud infrastructure pull requests.
• Cloud Security & Compliance Integration: Collaborate with IT Security to implement network perimeter defenses, AWS WAF, AWS Config, GuardDuty, and centralized identity provisioning (IAM, IAM Identity Center, AWS KMS, and Secrets Manager).
• Compute & Storage Substrate Engineering: Deliver resilient compute and storage architectures to support high-performance research and analytics—spanning Amazon EKS container workloads, GPU-accelerated EC2 instances,serverless functions, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, and tier-optimized S3/EFS storage.
• Resilience, Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity: Architect multi-AZ and cross-region disaster recovery models for mission-critical services, establishing RTO/RPO targets, automated backups, and running periodic failover drills.
• Observability, Auditability & FinOps: Implement comprehensive telemetry using CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs. Partner with leadership to lead platform capacity planning, enforce tagging standards, and support FinOps cost attribution across research initiatives.

Required Skills & Experience

• Enterprise Cloud Architecture: 8+ years of hands-on experience designing, deploying, and maintaining enterprise- scale AWS multi-account environments.
• Advanced Networking: In-depth expertise in AWS networking services, including AWS Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPC Peering, PrivateLink, Route 53 resolver rules, and hybrid cloud connectivity.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Advanced production proficiency with Terraform (module authoring, state management, drift detection) or AWS CloudFormation/CDK and ensure all company IaC is properly protected.
• Cloud Security & Governance: Demonstrated mastery of AWS IAM (RBAC/ABAC, permission boundaries), AWS Organizations SCPs, KMS encryption/key rotation, and compliance auditing via AWS Config and GuardDuty.
• Container Platforms & Modern Compute: Practical experience architecting and operating Kubernetes clusters (Amazon EKS) alongside traditional EC2 fleets and serverless (AWS Lambda) paradigms.
• Data Storage & Database Technologies: Proven track record architecting secure data layers across Amazon S3 (replication, lifecycle rules), RDS (PostgreSQL/MySQL), DynamoDB, and distributed file storage (EFS).
• Observability & Audit Tooling: Hands-on experience building centralized logging and telemetry solutions using CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs integrated with enterprise SIEM and alerting frameworks.

 Preferred Qualifications

• A Current AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty certification.
• Experience in architecting cloud platforms supporting biomedical research, life sciences, Databricks Lakehouse, or AI/ML workloads (Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker).
• Demonstrated success establishing FinOps disciplines, cost-allocation frameworks, and automated budget containment guardrails.
• Track record building automated, self-service developer and researcher sandbox environments with automated provisioning and teardown.