Sr AWS Engineer

Role Overview: Lead the design, implementation, and ongoing optimization of secure, scalable, and cost-effective AWS-based solutions to support global dossier initiatives. Ensure alignment with government objectives, data governance, and regulatory requirements. Drive automation, resilience, and operational excellence across cloud environments, while mentoring teams and shaping cloud strategy.

Key Responsibilities:

• Cloud Strategy Development
  • Develop and articulate a comprehensive cloud strategy aligned with government objectives, prioritizing security, compliance, and cost-efficiency.
  • Define cloud standards, reference architectures, and roadmaps that support global dossier initiatives.
• Architecture Design and Implementation
  • Design robust, scalable cloud architectures leveraging AWS native services to meet government requirements for performance, availability, and resilience.
  • Architect and implement high-availability, disaster recovery, and backup solutions; design for rapid recovery and minimal downtime.
• Security, Compliance, and Data Protection
  • Establish and enforce security controls across all cloud environments (identity, access management, encryption, network segmentation, secret management).
  • Ensure compliance with government regulations, data sovereignty requirements, and industry best practices; implement continuous security monitoring and threat mitigation.
  • Lead data protection initiatives, including data classification, privacy impact assessments, and secure data lifecycle management.
• Cost Optimization and Financial Governance
  • Continuously analyze and optimize cloud spend; implement cost-control mechanisms, tagging strategy, and chargeback/showback models.
  • Recommend and implement scalable, cost-efficient patterns without sacrificing performance or security.
• Migration Planning and Execution
  • Lead migration planning and execution for government applications and data to the cloud, minimizing downtime and risk.
  • Develop migration blueprints, cutover plans, and rollback strategies; coordinate cross-team execution.
• Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
  • Develop, test, and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans; ensure critical services remain available during outages or disasters.
  • Regularly validate recovery objectives (RPO/RTO) and update runbooks.
• Cloud Operations, Automation, and SRE
  • Implement and operate robust observability (monitoring, logging, tracing) and incident response processes.
  • Build and maintain automation pipelines (CI/CD) for infrastructure as code, deployments, and configuration management.
  • Establish performance engineering practices to optimize cloud workloads and ensure SLA attainment.
• Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)
  • Collaborate with security, privacy, legal, and compliance teams to ensure governance requirements are met.
  • Maintain documentation, risk assessments, and audit readiness for cloud environments.
• Team Training and Capability Building
  • Mentor and coach team members; deliver training and knowledge transfer to corporate staff and operations teams.
  • Promote cloud best practices, coding standards, and operational excellence.
• Stakeholder Collaboration and Vendor Management
  • Partner with government program teams, security offices, and external vendors to drive cloud initiatives.
  • Evaluate and manage third-party tools, managed services, and cloud-related contracts.
• Data Governance and Data Platform Collaboration
  • Work with data engineering and data governance teams to design secure data pipelines, data access controls, and compliant data sharing patterns for the dossier platform.

Required Skills and Experience:

• Extensive hands-on experience with AWS architecture, security, compliance, cost optimization, and migration at scale.
• Strong understanding of government IT requirements, data sovereignty, and regulatory frameworks.
• Proficiency with IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Config, and network security (VPC, subnets, VPN/Direct Connect, security groups).
• Experience designing and implementing disaster recovery, high availability, and backup strategies.
• Demonstrated ability to build and operate CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and automation tooling.
• Deep knowledge of observability (CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry), monitoring, incident management, and SRE practices.
• Data security and privacy acumen, including encryption, key management, and secure data lifecycle.
• Strong troubleshooting, problem-solving, and communication skills; ability to translate business needs into technical solutions.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with government cloud environments (e.g., AWS GovCloud) or regulated sectors.
• Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, AWS Certified Security - Specialty, or equivalent.
• Prior leadership or mentorship experience; ability to guide cross-functional teams.