Type of Requisition:
Regular
Clearance Level Must Currently Possess:
None
Clearance Level Must Be Able to Obtain:
None
Public Trust/Other Required:
NACLC (T3)
Job Family:
IT Infrastructure and Operations
Job Qualifications:
Skills:
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), Certificate Management, Internet Information Server (IIS) Administration, NIST 800-53
Certifications:
None
Experience:
5 + years of related experience
US Citizenship Required:
No
Job Description:
At GDIT, people are our differentiator. As a Cloud Application Engineer, you will help run and modernize the hosting platform behind NIAID's scientific and business applications — a hybrid estate spanning AWS and Windows, supporting research into infectious and immunologic disease. You will define infrastructure in Terraform rather than in tickets, ship it through GitHub, and instrument what you build so the team knows something is wrong before a researcher does. You will also help move the remaining on-prem Windows workloads into AWS and improve them once they land. We will want your opinion on operational processes, deployment patterns, tooling, and where the platform should go next. A focus on always-up, always-available applications is a plus.
In this role, a typical day will include the following:
- Deploying, hardening, and troubleshooting Windows applications on Windows Server and IIS — including .NET workloads, TLS certificate lifecycle, vulnerability remediation, and performance tuning.
- Administering SQL Server databases across on-prem instances and Amazon RDS, including migrations, performance tuning, and backup and recovery.
- Defining AWS infrastructure as code in Terraform — writing modules, managing state, and building reusable patterns other teams can adopt.
- Building and maintaining deployment pipelines in GitHub Actions and AWS CodeBuild so that changes are reviewable, repeatable, and safe to ship.
- Fronting applications with AWS load balancing and web application firewall services — building target groups and health checks, and writing WAF rules that protect the application without breaking it.
- Instrumenting the platform: dashboards, service level objectives, and alerts that surface real degradation instead of noise, and retiring the alerts that do not.
- Migrating and modernizing Windows applications as they move from on-prem infrastructure to AWS, refactoring architecture where it makes sense along the way.
- Working closely with application owners and software engineers to identify requirements, plan, and implement projects — installing new custom applications with web services, database components, data hosting, and load balancing.
- Automating routine operational work into self-service capabilities, so application owners and developers can renew certificates, rotate service account credentials, and restart application services without opening a ticket.
- Monitoring application health and responding to alerts such as service down, failed backup, slow response time, or full file systems.
- Documenting day-to-day administrative processes and configuration information for the applications we support.
- Occasionally presenting to your team or our software developer colleagues on DevOps and cloud practices, new technologies, and how you approached and solved challenging technical problems.
- After hours and weekend work may occasionally be required for pre-planned maintenance or for troubleshooting service-impacting outages.
*This is a remote position. However, candidate must be local and/or able to come onsite once a week in Rockville, MD*
- BA/BS or equivalent and six to eight years of related experience, including a minimum of three years hands-on with AWS.
- Minimum of three years hands-on AWS experience across commonly used services — IAM, EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, Route 53, SSM, and CloudTrail — including designing and operating production workloads.
- Demonstrated experience authoring Terraform from scratch — modules, remote state, and lifecycle management — not solely modifying existing configurations.
- Minimum of five years hands-on experience deploying, configuring, hardening, and troubleshooting applications on Windows Server 2019, 2022, or 2025 and IIS v8.5 and v10, including .NET 8 and .NET 9 workloads.
- Strong experience administering Microsoft SQL Server (2017, 2019, 2022, or 2025) and Amazon RDS for SQL Server, including performance tuning, backup and recovery, and migration between the two.
- Experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or AWS CodeBuild, with Git-based branching and pull request workflows as the default way of working.
- Strong scripting experience with PowerShell, plus Python or Bash.
- Working knowledge of observability and site reliability practices — metrics, logs, traces, service level objectives, and alerting — using a platform such as Datadog, CloudWatch, or equivalent.
- Experience creating, applying, and troubleshooting TLS or SSL certificates for web servers such as IIS, Tomcat, Apache, or nginx, and managing certificates through AWS Certificate Manager.
- Experience analyzing solution components, understanding systems integration challenges, and identifying technology gaps that must be resolved to reach future performance and functionality targets.
- Able to clearly present ideas to both technical and non-technical users and staff to further the adoption of cloud and DevOps practices.
- Ability to obtain and maintain an NIH Public Trust security clearance.
- Experience with AWS edge and traffic services — Application and Network Load Balancers, AWS WAF, CloudFront, and Route 53 routing policies.
- Experience migrating and modernizing Windows-based applications on AWS — moving IIS, .NET, and SQL Server workloads off legacy infrastructure and improving them once they land.
- Experience building the automation others depend on: reusable Terraform modules, pipeline tooling, automated validation and drift detection, and self-service capabilities that let application owners handle routine tasks independently.
- Experience breaking down monolithic applications into containers and running them on AWS ECS.
- Experience managing secrets and credential lifecycle using AWS Secrets Manager or Parameter Store, including automated rotation of service accounts and certificates.
- Experience with fleet configuration and patch automation at scale using SSM State Manager and Patch Manager, or PowerShell DSC.
- Familiarity with application-level resilience and availability patterns — health checks, graceful degradation, multi-AZ deployment, and recovery testing.
- Experience with access and authentication technologies such as LDAP, SAML, or Kerberos.
- Current AWS certification — Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator, or DevOps Engineer.
- Depth in Datadog or mature site reliability practice — service level objective design, error budgets, and incident response and postmortem process.
- Familiarity with AI and large language model workflows using Amazon Bedrock or Amazon Q / Amazon Quick, and interest in applying them to operational and documentation work.
The likely salary range for this position is $108,800 - $147,200. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, geographic location and possibly contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range.
Scheduled Weekly Hours:
40
Travel Required:
None
Telecommuting Options:
Remote
Work Location:
Any Location / Remote
Additional Work Locations:
Total Rewards at GDIT:
Our benefits package for all US-based employees includes a variety of medical plan options, some with Health Savings Accounts, dental plan options, a vision plan, and a 401(k) plan offering the ability to contribute both pre and post-tax dollars up to the IRS annual limits and receive a company match. To encourage work/life balance, GDIT offers employees full flex work weeks where possible and a variety of paid time off plans, including vacation, sick and personal time, holidays, paid parental, military, bereavement and jury duty leave. GDIT typically provides new employees with 15 days of paid leave per calendar year to be used for vacations, personal business, and illness and an additional 10 paid holidays per year. Paid leave and paid holidays are prorated based on the employee’s date of hire. The GDIT Paid Family Leave program provides a total of up to 160 hours of paid leave in a rolling 12 month period for eligible employees. To ensure our employees are able to protect their income, other offerings such as short and long-term disability benefits, life, accidental death and dismemberment, personal accident, critical illness and business travel and accident insurance are provided or available. We regularly review our Total Rewards package to ensure our offerings are competitive and reflect what our employees have told us they value most.
Our Identity Verification Process:
As part of the hiring process, we will ask you to complete an identity verification process that leverages advanced biometrics and artificial intelligence to ensure authenticity and protect against identity fraud. You are expected to be on camera during virtual interviews. We reserve the right to take your picture to verify your identity and prevent fraud. By proceeding, you authorize the collection, processing, and use of your biometric data for identity verification and security purposes.
