Cloud Engineer

Elder Research • Arlington, VA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

Elder Research Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of MANTECH international Corporation seeks a motivated, career and customer-oriented Junior Cloud Developer to join our team in Arlington, VA. This position is hybrid with 1-4+ days a month on site. We are seeking a motivated Junior Cloud Developer to join our cloud infrastructure team. In this role, you will design, deploy, and maintain scalable cloud solutions on AWS, with a strong focus on Infrastructure as Code using AWS CloudFormation. You will work alongside senior engineers to build containerized workloads on ECS Fargate, package Python applications as production-grade Docker images, and contribute to a culture of operational excellence through observability, automation, and secure-by-default practices.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field or equivalent practical experience.
• 12 years of experience with AWS services, including hands-on use of CloudFormation, ECS, ECR, IAM, and VPC networking.
• Must be a US Citizen and be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance prior to starting this position.
• Working knowledge of Docker: writing Dockerfiles, building images, and managing container lifecycles.
• Proficiency in Python; experience packaging Python applications for containerized deployments preferred.
• Familiarity with ALB configuration, target groups, listener rules, and health check behavior.
• Understanding of IAM fundamentals: roles, policies, trust relationships, and least-privilege principles.
• Basic familiarity with AWS CloudWatch for logging and monitoring.

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to ECS Fargate task definitions, awsvpc networking mode, and service autoscaling configurations.
• Experience with blue/green or canary deployment strategies via AWS CodeDeploy or similar.
• Familiarity with AWS Parameter Store and/or Secrets Manager for runtime secret injection.
• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner or AWS Certified Developer Associate certification (or in progress).
• Familiarity with Lambda development and event-driven architectures.
• Typescript

Responsibilities

• CloudFormation & Infrastructure as Code (Primary) Author, review, and maintain CloudFormation stacks for ECS clusters, services, task definitions, ALBs, Target Groups, IAM roles/policies, and ECR repositories, while parameterizing stacks for portability across dev, staging, and production and ensuring compliance with organizational standards, security baselines, and ACES/CCoE governance patterns. Implement drift detection, manage stack updates, and utilize StackSets where appropriate; participate in stack reviews to ensure consistency, security, and reusability of infrastructure templates.
• ECS Fargate Design and deploy Fargate services using awsvpc networking, task roles, and service-level autoscaling, including configuration of ALB routing, target groups, health checks, and deployment strategies such as blue/green and canary releases. Define and maintain service-level observability using CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Metrics and Alarms, and AWS X-Ray tracing.
• Docker & Python Convert Python projects into production-grade Docker images using multi-stage builds, slim base images, and reproducible build patterns, and publish/manage images in Amazon ECR following tagging and lifecycle policy standards. Configure runtime settings and secrets via AWS Parameter Store and Secrets Manager, enforcing least-privilege access through task rolescoped IAM policies
• Lambda (Secondary) Build and maintain CloudFormation-deployed Lambda functions for lightweight control-plane tasks (e.g., policy orchestration, scheduled maintenance operations) while ensuring compliance with organizational controls and tagging policies per established operating procedures.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level