AWS Cloud Engineer

GDIT is seeking an AWS Cloud Engineer to support our NIAID team in Rockville, MD.

The role spans the full delivery lifecycle: AWS infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling, and administration of the Windows Server, Active Directory, and SQL Server estate. The engineer independently owns infrastructure design, sets technical direction, and mentors junior engineers.

This role is hybrid with 3 days onsite per week in Rockville, MD.

This role will require you to obtain and maintain a Public Trust and will require you to provide onsite fingerprinting at a designated facility. This investigation may review personal and criminal behavior, financial conduct, foreign influence, as well as other adjudications.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain highly available AWS environments for reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Build and manage infrastructure as code using Terraform, including reusable modules and pipelines.
• Develop automation tooling, scripts, and lightweight internal applications (PowerShell, Python, or similar) that streamline provisioning, configuration, and operations.
• Build developer-facing tooling, internal APIs, and self-service capabilities that improve delivery velocity.
• Administer Windows Server, including performance tuning and root cause analysis.
• Administer Active Directory, including AD DS, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, certificate services, and integration with AWS Managed Microsoft AD.
• Administer Microsoft SQL Server on EC2 and RDS, including backup/recovery, high availability, and performance tuning.
• Support migration of Windows and SQL Server workloads from on premises to AWS.
• Monitor system health using Datadog and CloudWatch; drive incident response, runbooks, and reliability improvements.
• Serve as an escalation point for complex incidents and lead root cause analysis.
• Maintain backup/DR configurations and participate in restore testing.
• Perform capacity planning, cost optimization, and resource tagging.
• Develop technical documentation and mentor junior engineers.
• Apply AI-assisted engineering tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude, AWS Kiro) to accelerate IaC development and troubleshooting.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelors and 4+ years of relevant IT experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Experience independently owning cloud infrastructure design and setting technical direction on complex initiatives.
• Experience translating customer/stakeholder requirements into implemented technical solutions.
• Hands‑on AWS experience across compute, storage, networking, database, IAM, backup, and monitoring services.
• Experience with Terraform (or CloudFormation/CDK) for infrastructure as code.
• Strong software development background — able to build automation tools, internal services, or lightweight applications, not just administrative scripts.
• Strong PowerShell skills with working proficiency in Python.
• Deep Windows Server engineering experience, including root cause analysis of complex issues.
• Experience administering Active Directory (AD DS, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, certificate services, enterprise authentication).
• Experience administering SQL Server, including backup/recovery, HA, and RDS administration.
• Solid understanding of AWS networking (VPC, routing, security groups, load balancing, hybrid connectivity).
• Experience with observability and incident response practices using Datadog, CloudWatch, or similar.
• Experience supporting production systems under formal change control.
• Strong analytical skills and ability to explain technical solutions to technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect or DevOps Engineer certification.
• Microsoft Windows Server or Azure certification.
• Experience with containerization/orchestration (Docker, ECS, or EKS).
• Experience building internal APIs or full stack applications (front end and back end).
• Experience with AI/ML services (Bedrock, SageMaker) or AI-assisted engineering tools.
• Experience with AWS multi-account/landing zone patterns (Organizations, Control Tower, IAM Identity Center).
• Familiarity with FinOps, cost optimization, and tagging strategies.
• Experience with on-prem-to-AWS migrations.
• Experience in federal, healthcare, or regulated environments (FISMA/FedRAMP).

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