JOB OVERVIEWA senior hands-on contributor who designs, automates, and evolves secure, scalable AWS platform foundations and delivery pipelines for secure, scalable, and cost-efficient applications. Reporting to the Manager, DevOps (Platform Engineering), this role builds production-ready cloud architectures in AWS, codifies everything (Infrastructure as Code), and drives reliable CI/CD with strong guardrails. As a DevOps Engineer III, you'll own complex components, accelerate product teams, and collaborate across Security, App Dev, and SRE, without formal people management responsibilities. This role also carries hands-on database performance ownership - from query optimization up through deployment pipelines - and partners with full-stack engineering to help own infrastructure end-to-end as the business scales.
RESPONSIBILITIES AND DUTIES- Technical Leadership & Collaboration
- Serve as a senior individual contributor for cloud and delivery engineering, mentor junior teammates via reviews, pairing, and documentation
- Translate business and compliance requirements into practical designs, tickets, and runbooks; communicate tradeoffs and timelines
- Partner with Security, App Dev, Reliability, and Connectivity teams to align architecture, SLAs, and incident processes; contribute to technical standards
- Cloud Architecture & Platform Engineering
- Design and implement AWS architectures (ECS, VPC, ApiGateway, Lambda, Amplify, Route 53) for highly available apps
- Engineer resilient data/service backends (RDS, S3, ElasticSearch, SQS, SNS) with appropriate networking, backup, and DR patterns
- Implement secrets and configuration management (Secrets Manager, IAM roles) and environment isolation across dev/test/stage/prod
- Evaluate and implement database scaling strategies (read replicas, partitioning, sharding)
- Optimize queries, table indexing, database replication, and connection pooling
- Configure and tune load balancers, DNS, VPC design, and SSL/TLS certificate management
- CI/CD & Automation
- Implement GitOps/continuous delivery with policy gates, approvals, environments, and automated rollbacks
- Codify infrastructure using expert-level AWS CDK and CloudFormation, enforce drift detection, author and manage reusable versioned modules, and automated plan/apply with change controls
- Write infrastructure-as-code using AWS CDK and CloudFormation
- Implement GitLab CI pipelines (build, security scans, infra deploy, progressive delivery)
- Own CI/CD pipeline maintenance and creation across the pipeline lifecycle
- Build platform automation and internal tooling with PowerShell/Python + Microsoft Graph/Azure CLI; create self-service templates and golden images
- Support SRE practices including SLOs, error budgets, and blue/green, canary, or zero-downtime deployment strategies
- Cost & Performance Management
- Use AWS cost tools to right-size compute/storage, tune autoscaling profiles, and optimize reservations/spot usage; publish cost dashboards and forecasts
- Proactively reduce spend via architectural improvements (caching, CDN, data lifecycle policies, build farm efficiency)
- Develop and implement reservation strategy across the organization
- Observability & Security
- Embed observability solutions (Cloudwatch, AWS X-Ray) across platform services
- Improve platform observability by tracing performance metrics and building alerting systems
- Enforce security guardrails through IAM policies, role separation, and least privilege principles
- Design secure, compliant architectures aligned with frameworks (e.g., SOC2, HIPAA, ISO27001)
- Documentation & Knowledge Management
- Maintain high-quality architecture diagrams, pipeline docs, runbooks, architecture decision records, and "how-to" guides; keep standards current and searchable
- Contribute patterns/modules to the internal platform catalog; champion reuse over one-offs
QUALIFICATIONS- 5+ years hands-on AWS experience (ECS, RDS, ALB, VPC, CloudWatch, Lambda, Amplify)
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code (AWS CDK or CloudFormation)
- CI/CD pipeline experience (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or similar)
- Windows Server + PowerShell automation proficiency; working Linux/Bash proficiency
- Strong networking fundamentals (routing, DNS, load balancing, private endpoints, VPC networking, SSL management)
- Proven experience scaling containerized services and debugging autoscaling behavior
- Deep MySQL and PostgreSQL performance tuning: query optimization, indexing strategies, replication configuration
- Experience documenting infrastructure for team knowledge-sharing
- Experience designing secure, compliant architectures (e.g., SOC2, HIPAA, ISO27001 context helpful)
- Knowledge of event-driven and messaging patterns (Service Bus vs Event Grid vs Storage Queues)
- Typescript (nice to have)
REQUIRED SOFTWARE EXPERIENCE- AWS CDK & CloudFormation
- AWS Management Console
- GitLab CI
- IIS
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
Note: This job description is not intended to be all-inclusive. Employees may perform other related duties as requested to meet the ongoing needs of the organization.Salary Range: $120,000.00 - $150,000.00 USDA word on Al-assisted candidate fraud & deepfakes: Our company maintains a zero-tolerance policy for the use of Al tools to misrepresent a candidate's skills, experience, or qualifications during the hiring process.
We utilize advanced screening methods to detect such practices and reserve the right to disqualify and report candidates who violate this policy. 
