Senior Cloud Systems Engineer

Custom Software Systems, Inc. (CSS) is seeking an experienced Senior Cloud Systems Engineer to play a key role in designing, building, and securing modern cloud-based solutions that support high-impact mission needs. This 100% onsite role in Washington, D.C. requires a seasoned technologist with deep expertise in application development, cloud engineering, and DevSecOps practices. The ideal candidate will bring strong technical leadership, hands-on cloud architecture skills, and a collaborative mindset to help drive the design, deployment, and optimization of secure, scalable cloud environments across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS platforms. 

Responsibilities 

• Design and create custom build cloud applications  

• Develop software according to software development lifecycles (SDLCs), including DevOps, Agile, Lean, or Iterative.  

• Design, deploying, and migrating secure and maintainable systems for Infrastructure  

as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) environment. 

• Work with the development team to keep the various environments (dev, test, and prod) up to date with security and maintenance updates, monitoring the environments for issues, providing design suggestions for the environments, and supporting the automated deployments into the environments. 

• Set up and configure DevSecOps for cloud environments  

• Partner with the cloud platform team and development team to build, manage, and enable  

• the underlying cloud infrastructure and platforms in support of a business application  
• development project. 

Citizenship 

• US Citizenship  

Required Qualifications 

• Ten (10) years of experience in the field of technology, including application development, five (5) of which focused on supporting cloud technologies.  

• Proficient in at least one high-level programming language such as Python, PowerShell, or Infrastructure as Code (AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Terraform, etc.).  

• DevOps, CI/CD pipelines and automation, containers, and related best practices for cloud deployment.  

• Service offerings in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and government platform experience preferred.  

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities 

• Understanding cloud-based architecture, web servers, caching, application servers, load balancers, and storage. Experience with AWS Load Balancer.  

• Familiarity with loose coupling, stateless systems, and best practices for designing cloud-ready applications.  

• Understanding of cloud federation technologies such as SAML, Okta, OAuth, and  

• OpenID Connect and how to apply these technologies to enterprise and public-facing applications.  

• Understanding cloud vendor cost structures and the ability to optimize solutions for cost effectiveness.  

• Experience transitioning legacy systems to cloud-ready architecture.  

• Understanding RESTful Web Services, XML, or JSON. Experience with AWS API Gateway.  

• Awareness of cloud information security risks and best practices, especially in a highly secure operating environment.  

• Familiarity with government cloud deployments (FedRAMP, FISMA, high security environments, etc.). 

• Experience with Scrum framework, Agile engineering, Lean methodologies or DevOps. 

• Experience with one or more of the following: system. development, software development, hardware development, or mission support. 

• Experience working with DevOps CI/CD related technologies (Azure DevOps, Git, Jenkins, Puppet, Docker, Confluence, Sonar Lint, and J-Unit. 

• Ability to work at the conceptual level and with program leads, customers, and internal teams to ensure successful system development, integration, and deployment. 

• Experience analyzing cloud requirements, concept of operations documents, and high-level system architectures to develop cloud system specifications. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience with GitLab or Azure DevOps. 

• Python 3.x data engineering with pandas, Databricks, or SPARK. 

• Experience with direct configuration and management of AWS components, including  

CloudTrail, CloudWatch, S3, RDS or Aurora, PostgresSQL, Lambda, Glue or MWAA (Airflow). 

• Experience with designing or implementing cloud architectures for analytics/data processing/machine learning use-cases, such as data lakes, lake formations, etc.  

• Experience with containerization as a strategy for cloud-enabling legacy applications such as Docker and Kubernetes (AWS EKS, ECS, or Fargate preferred). 

• Familiarity with the Well Architected Framework.  

• Experience defining platform requirements.  

• Experience integrating enterprise observability platforms such as Splunk.  

• Experience with Data Quality testing tooling (e.g., Great Expectations, Glue Data Quality). 

Certificates 

• At least one of the following certifications or its equivalent preferred: 

• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner 

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate 

• Cloud related (e.g., DevOps, Security, and/or ML) 

Education 

• Bachelor's degree in engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems or IT related discipline.