AWS Tech Lead

Indent ID - SF_OP_202305-23-1
Client:- Rithum
Role :- Contract
Position - WS Tech Lead
Experience: 8 - 12 yrs
# of positions: 2
C2C - $59/hr USD
Location: - Dallas, Texas (Hybrid)

About the Role
We are looking for a seasoned AWS Tech Lead to architect, build, and scale cloud-native platforms that power our next generation of products.
You will own end-to-end design and delivery of event-driven, serverless, and real-time data solutions on AWS - leading a high-performing team while staying hands-on with code and infrastructure.
This role demands deep AWS expertise, a passion for automation and infrastructure-as-code, and fluency with modern AI-assisted development tooling such as Claude (Anthropic) and Cursor. You will be a key technical voice in architecture decisions, mentorship, and engineering culture.


Core Technical Skills
AWS Native Services

• Design and own end-to-end cloud architectures using AWS-native services

• EC2, ECS / EKS, Fargate, Auto Scaling, ALB / NLB, Route 53, CloudFront
• IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, AWS Organizations, Control Tower
• S3, Glacier, CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, Systems Manager

• Apply AWS Well-Architected Framework principles across all workloads
• Drive cost optimization, reliability, security, and operational excellence

AWS Lambda & Serverless

• Architect and deliver production-grade serverless applications using AWS Lambda

• Cold-start mitigation, Provisioned Concurrency, memory/timeout tuning
• Lambda Layers, container image packaging, and function aliases

• Build event-driven systems integrating Lambda with API Gateway, SQS, SNS, S3, EventBridge
• Implement Lambda-based data pipelines and microservice backends
• Enforce security best practices - least-privilege IAM roles, VPC Lambda configurations

Amazon Kinesis (Real-Time Streaming)

• Design and operate real-time data streaming architectures with Kinesis

• Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, Kinesis Data Analytics

• Tune shard counts, retention periods, and throughput for high-volume ingestion
• Integrate Kinesis with Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, OpenSearch for end-to-end pipelines
• Handle backpressure, error recovery, and exactly-once / at-least-once semantics

Amazon DynamoDB

• Model and design DynamoDB tables for performance and scale

• Single-table design, partition key selection, composite sort keys, GSIs / LSIs

• Apply advanced patterns: adjacency lists, sparse indexes, optimistic locking
• Configure DynamoDB Streams, TTL, on-demand vs. provisioned capacity
• Optimize read/write costs and prevent hot partitions at scale
• Integrate DynamoDB with Lambda for real-time event-driven workflows

Amazon OpenSearch / Elasticsearch

• Deploy and manage Amazon OpenSearch Service (formerly Elasticsearch)
• Design index strategies, mappings, analyzers, and custom tokenizers
• Build complex search features: full-text search, fuzzy matching, aggregations, faceted search
• Ingest data from Kinesis Firehose, Lambda, and DynamoDB Streams into OpenSearch
• Tune cluster performance - shard allocation, replica strategy, JVM heap tuning
• Implement Kibana / OpenSearch Dashboards for operational monitoring and analytics

Infrastructure-as-Code - AWS CDK & Terraform

• Proficient in AWS CDK (TypeScript / Python) for cloud-native IaC

• Constructs, Stacks, Aspects, custom L2/L3 constructs, CDK Pipelines

• Strong hands-on experience with Terraform for multi-cloud and AWS infrastructure

• Modules, remote state, workspaces, Terragrunt for DRY configurations

• Enforce infrastructure consistency across dev / staging / production environments
• Integrate IaC into CI/CD pipelines (CodePipeline, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI)

AI-Powered Development - Claude & Cursor

• Proficient with Claude (Anthropic) for AI-assisted development workflows

• Use Claude API / Claude.ai for code generation, architecture review, and documentation
• Design prompt engineering strategies for consistent, high-quality code outputs
• Build internal tooling or developer workflows powered by the Claude API

• Proficient with Cursor IDE for AI-native development

• Leverage Cursor's in-editor AI for pair programming, refactoring, and debugging
• Configure Cursor with project-specific context for accurate code suggestions

• Advocate for responsible, high-leverage use of AI tooling across the engineering team

Key Skills Snapshot

AWS Lambda Kinesis Streams DynamoDB OpenSearch / ES AWS CDK Terraform Claude API Cursor IDE API Gateway EventBridge SQS / SNS CloudFormation CI/CD Pipelines Docker / ECS Microservices Serverless
Roles & Responsibilities

• Lead architectural design and technical direction for cloud-native AWS solutions
• Drive end-to-end delivery of serverless and event-driven systems from design to production
• Review and approve infrastructure-as-code (CDK / Terraform) across all environments
• Mentor and level up engineers through design reviews, pair programming, and 1:1s
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and release quality
• Define and enforce AWS security baselines, IAM governance, and compliance controls
• Collaborate with Product and Data teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions
• Lead production incident response, RCA, and engineering post-mortems
• Drive the adoption of AI tooling (Claude, Cursor) across the engineering team
• Evaluate and introduce new AWS services and emerging technologies relevant to product goals
• Contribute hands-on to codebase - this is a coding tech lead role, not management-only

Required Experience & Qualifications

• 8 - 12 years of software / cloud engineering experience with significant AWS exposure
• Demonstrated track record of designing and shipping large-scale AWS cloud-native systems
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language: Python, Node.js, Java, or Go
• Deep hands-on experience with all of: Lambda, Kinesis, DynamoDB, OpenSearch
• Production-grade experience with AWS CDK or Terraform (not just awareness)
• Proven experience leading engineering teams and conducting technical design reviews
• Familiarity with AWS security best practices, WAF, Shield, and compliance frameworks
• Comfortable with Agile / Scrum delivery methodologies

Nice to Have

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional or DevOps Engineer - Professional
• Experience building or productizing systems using LLM/GenAI APIs (Claude, OpenAI, etc.)
• Background in data engineering, streaming analytics, or real-time ML pipelines
• Experience with multi-region, active-active AWS architectures
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or cloud tooling projects

Sr. No Skills Years of Exp Rating 1 8 - 12 years of software / cloud engineering experience with significant AWS exposure 2 Demonstrated track record of designing and shipping large-scale AWS cloud-native systems 3 Strong proficiency in at least one backend language: Python, Node.js, Java, or Go 4 Deep hands-on experience with all of: Lambda, Kinesis, DynamoDB, OpenSearch 5 Production-grade experience with AWS CDK or Terraform (not just awareness) 6 Proven experience leading engineering teams and conducting technical design reviews 7 Familiarity with AWS security best practices, WAF, Shield, and compliance frameworks 8 9