AWS Cloud Data Platform Administrator

ZipStaff•Raritan, NJ

23h•Onsite

About The Position

ZipStaff is seeking an experienced AWS Cloud Data Platform Administrator to manage, secure, automate, and optimize enterprise-grade data platforms hosted on AWS for a global technology services firm. The role is accountable for platform availability, performance, governance, cost efficiency, and operational excellence across data engineering, analytics, and integration services. The position is on-site in Raritan, New Jersey, four days per week, and is a W2 contract through ZipStaff; C2C and 1099 arrangements are not accepted. The administrator supports AWS data platforms across development, test, staging, and production environments, including services for data storage, analytics, compute, integration, security, and monitoring. The role uses infrastructure-as-code, scripting, and CI/CD to provision resources and automate operations. It also covers production support, platform security and governance, cost and performance optimization, resilience planning, documentation, stakeholder collaboration, and technical leadership.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
At least 7 years of overall experience in cloud infrastructure, data platform administration, database administration, or data engineering operations.
At least 4 years of hands-on experience supporting AWS environments, including production data and analytics workloads.
Strong hands-on administration experience with AWS data analytics, compute, storage, networking, security, and monitoring services.
Deep understanding of data lake, data warehouse, lakehouse, batch-processing, and streaming architectures.
Experience administering Amazon Redshift, including workload management, query tuning, distribution and sort strategies, scaling, snapshots, and security.
Experience with AWS Glue Data Catalog, crawlers, jobs, and workflows, and Lake Formation permissions.
Working knowledge of Apache Spark and Amazon EMR administration, troubleshooting, scaling, and performance tuning.
Strong knowledge of Amazon S3 design, including bucket policies, lifecycle rules, versioning, replication, encryption, and access controls.
Proficiency in IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, VPC, security groups, private endpoints, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, AWS Config, and GuardDuty.
Experience with Terraform or CloudFormation and CI/CD tools such as AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or GitLab CI/CD.
Proficiency in Python and Shell scripting for administration, monitoring, deployment, and remediation automation.
Strong SQL skills and familiarity with relational databases, data modeling, ETL/ELT patterns, and data integration.
Knowledge of observability, log analytics, backup, disaster recovery, patching, and production-support practices.
Understanding of cloud cost-management practices, including tagging standards, budgets, usage analysis, and rightsizing.
Demonstrated experience operating highly available, secure, and scalable enterprise platforms.
Strong troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, documentation, communication, and stakeholder-management skills.
Ability to work on-site in Raritan, NJ, four days per week.
Ability to participate in on-call support and planned maintenance when required.

Nice To Haves

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional.
AWS Certified Data Engineer.
Experience with additional AWS services such as EC2, EKS, Lambda, and CloudWatch for performance monitoring.
Background supporting large-scale data platform operations in complex enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

Administer and support AWS-based data platforms across development, test, staging, and production environments.
Manage Amazon S3, Redshift, RDS/Aurora, Glue, EMR, Athena, Lake Formation, Kinesis, Lambda, DMS, Step Functions, and CloudWatch services.
Provision and configure cloud resources using Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS CDK.
Implement identity and access controls using IAM roles, policies, permission boundaries, AWS Organizations, and service control policies.
Monitor platform health, capacity, job execution, data pipelines, storage, and query performance; proactively identify and resolve issues.
Perform incident, problem, change, release, and service-request management according to defined SLAs and ITIL practices.
Optimize Redshift clusters, Spark/EMR workloads, storage tiers, data transfer, and compute consumption for performance and cost.
Implement backup, recovery, high-availability, business-continuity, and disaster-recovery controls; conduct periodic restoration and failover tests.
Secure data through encryption, key management, private networking, secrets management, logging, vulnerability remediation, and least-privilege access.
Enable data governance through cataloging, lineage, classification, access auditing, retention, and lifecycle-management controls.
Build operational automation using Python, Shell scripting, AWS CLI, SDKs, and CI/CD pipelines.
Maintain platform standards, runbooks, architecture diagrams, configuration records, SOPs, troubleshooting guides, and audit evidence.
Partner with data engineers, architects, security teams, application teams, FinOps, and business stakeholders on onboarding, migrations, upgrades, and capacity planning.
Provide technical leadership, mentor junior administrators, coordinate vendor support, and drive root-cause analysis and continuous improvement.
Participate in on-call support and planned maintenance activities when required.