Job Title: AWS/EKS Platform Engineer
Location: Reston, VA (Hybrid — 1 day/week onsite; only local candidates will be considered)
Company Overview
Our client is a leading enterprise healthcare organization undertaking a major cloud transformation and platform modernization initiative.
Project Description
We are seeking an AWS Platform Engineer for a long-term contract position supporting our client in the Reston, VA area (candidates based in DC, MD, or VA preferred). This role covers the full service lifecycle — inception, design, deployment, and operations — with a strong focus on cloud-native automation, EKS provisioning, and enterprise cloud transformation.
Key Responsibilities
- Communicate architectural decisions, plans, and strategies, balancing short-term trade-offs with long-term commitments
- Engage in and improve the end-to-end lifecycle of services, from inception and design through deployment and operations
- Establish automation capabilities leveraging cloud-native solutions to improve the developer experience
- Support system design consulting, platform/framework development, capacity planning, and launch reviews
- Troubleshoot difficult issues and engage directly with the customer
- Drive systems scalability and sustainability through automation and reliability improvements
- Lead enterprise cloud transformation and migration efforts
- Guide customers on cloud-native design and architecture patterns
- Provide consultation on technology infrastructure planning and engineering
- Establish strategies to migrate legacy applications into microservices hosted on AWS
- Leverage containers, immutable infrastructure, microservices, and service mesh to build highly available, fault-tolerant applications
- Research global technology trends and their applicability to internal development teams and business initiatives
- Promote modern application design and engineering best practices across the development and operations lifecycle
- Monitor and manage stability, availability, and performance across enterprise systems and platforms (systems, network, storage, security)
- Automate end-to-end processes for patching and upgrading the AWS cloud ecosystem
- Make data-driven recommendations to improve software delivery efficiency
- Mentor peers and collaborate across teams to socialize solutions
Mandatory Skills
- Minimum of one AWS certification required
- 10+ years of IT experience, including at least 5 years in AWS Cloud, with SME-level knowledge of provisioning via automation using EKS
- AI experience required
- Strong leadership experience driving transformation initiatives
- Experience with SRE principles and transformation
- 3+ years with Kubernetes, cloud technologies (AWS, Azure), DevOps toolchain (Ansible, Jenkins, Artifactory, Bitbucket), and IaC/CI/CD patterns
- Solid understanding of software engineering (build, integration, test, release, deployment) using Python
- Experience developing and challenging engineering solutions in collaboration with peers, architects, and customers
- Hands-on experience building robust middleware environments; Linux system administration required
- Strong hands-on knowledge of AWS services including VPC, Networking, Direct Connect, Subnets, NACLs, Security Groups, EC2, S3, IAM, ELBs, Lambda, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and EKS
- Current, hands-on production-level experience in AWS Cloud
- Hands-on experience with automation and Infrastructure Provisioning (Infrastructure as Code / Policy as Code)
- Familiarity with Terraform automation, Ansible playbooks, and Python
- Experience with AWS CloudFormation and CDK required
- Hands-on experience writing Lambda functions, preferably in Python (Boto3)
- Strong Linux Bash scripting skills
- Solid understanding of DevOps toolchains, including Git/repo, Crucible, and Jenkins
- Solid understanding and experience with CI/CD toolchains
Nice-to-Have Skills
- Hands-on experience with containerization and Amazon EKS