Lead Cloud & DevOps Engineer

Blend360•St. Louis, MO

About The Position

Blend360 is seeking an experienced Senior Cloud & DevOps Engineer for a temporary position, with potential for permanency, to support the build and production readiness of a foundational AWS data platform for a large telecommunications client. This role will focus on provisioning and operating core AWS infrastructure, including data ingestion and orchestration services, data lake and analytics platforms, and establishing CI/CD pipelines, environment management, monitoring, and operational controls. The ideal candidate will possess strong expertise in AWS-native architecture, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), release engineering, observability, and secure platform operations in regulated environments. This individual will collaborate with Data Engineers, BI Consultants, and Governance leads to ensure the platform is deployable, scalable, secure, and compliant with enterprise standards.

Requirements

Strong hands-on experience with CI/CD tooling and release automation.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code using Terraform or similar tools.
Hands-on experience deploying and operating cloud-native workloads in AWS, including services such as AWS Glue, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ECS/EKS, AWS Lambda, IAM, and VPC networking.
Experience with Databricks and/or Snowflake deployments in AWS environments.
Strong understanding of containerisation, serverless architectures, managed compute services, and environment promotion strategies.
Experience with observability tooling covering logging, monitoring, alerting, and service health.
Knowledge of security best practices including IAM, RBAC, secrets management, encryption, and policy-driven access control.
Experience supporting production-grade data platforms in enterprise environments, ideally in regulated sectors with compliance requirements such as PIPEDA or equivalent.
Familiarity with Git-based workflows and collaborative engineering practices.
Strong troubleshooting, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AWS data and analytics services including AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, AWS Lake Formation, Amazon EMR, and Amazon S3 data lake architectures.
Familiarity with medallion/lakehouse architectures using Databricks or Snowflake on AWS.
Experience with CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild.
Experience with ECS or EKS-based deployments and container orchestration in AWS.
Experience implementing observability and data quality monitoring for ingestion pipelines and SLA-driven orchestration workflows.
Understanding of Canadian data privacy requirements (PIPEDA) and how they translate into platform controls such as PII tagging, RBAC design, encryption, audit logging, and data governance.
Experience supporting service transition into managed support models.
Exposure to QA automation and non-functional testing in cloud-native systems.

Responsibilities

Design and implement AWS cloud infrastructure and deployment patterns for the data platform, including multi-account AWS Organizations strategy, IAM design, networking, naming conventions, and tagging standards.
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines to support repeatable, controlled releases across Development, Test, and Production environments.
Provision and configure AWS infrastructure as code (Terraform), including services such as AWS Glue, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, VPC networking, VPN/Direct Connect connectivity, Route 53, security groups, and firewall controls to connect on-premises source systems.
Configure Git-based integration and deployment workflows for platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake to enforce version-controlled deployments.
Support deployment of backend services, orchestration components, data services, APIs, and front-end applications.
Enable monitoring, logging, alerting, and telemetry using services such as Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and observability platforms like Datadog.
Define and implement operational controls for reliability, performance, scalability, backup/recovery, and incident response.
Implement and enforce secure access patterns using AWS IAM, IAM Identity Center (AWS SSO), AWS Secrets Manager, AWS KMS, and policy-driven access controls, including row-level and column-level security requirements where applicable.
Ensure the solution aligns with architecture, security, governance, and service transition requirements.
Support non-functional testing, release readiness, and path-to-production activities.
Produce comprehensive operational runbooks, platform documentation, and a full IaC handover package enabling the client’s internal IT team to take ownership of platform operations at programme close.
Support cost management, network performance tuning, and security hardening of the AWS platform; contribute to FinOps reporting and disaster recovery planning.