Lead Cloud Engineer (Security / SRE)

Ignite IT•Suitland, MD

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Ignite IT is seeking a Lead Cloud Engineer to support the U.S. Census Bureau as it modernizes its enterprise IT environment ahead of the 2030 Decennial Census. This hands-on technical leadership role focuses on building, operating, and securing cloud infrastructure in a hybrid environment built on AWS GovCloud, with Azure where applicable. The engineer will help ensure infrastructure is reliable and secure at national scale by evaluating existing cloud and on-premises environments, closing security and configuration gaps, and guiding other engineers.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship.
At least 8 years of hands-on experience in site reliability engineering, cloud engineering, cloud infrastructure engineering, or cloud security engineering, including technical leadership.
Strong hands-on experience implementing and operating production infrastructure in AWS, with a track record of delivered projects.
Practical experience configuring AWS services securely, including IAM, network controls such as VPCs, security groups and network ACLs, encryption with KMS, and logging with CloudTrail and CloudWatch.
Hands-on experience with AWS security services such as GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, or Inspector, including acting on findings.
Experience automating AWS infrastructure and operations through infrastructure as code and scripting.
Ability to evaluate existing AWS and hybrid environments and turn findings into practical fixes and clear recommendations.
Strong communication skills and experience leading technical discussions with engineers and leadership.

Nice To Haves

AWS GovCloud experience.
Production infrastructure as code experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, or Ansible, including reusable modules and code review.
Experience hardening systems against CIS Benchmarks or DISA STIGs.
Container and Kubernetes experience.
Experience with CI/CD pipelines in GitLab or GitHub.
Experience across more than one cloud platform.
Direct federal, government, or large distributed enterprise experience.

Responsibilities

Build, operate, and improve secure cloud infrastructure in AWS and Azure where applicable, with a focus on reliability, automation, and security.
Configure cloud services securely by default, including least-privilege IAM, network segmentation, encryption and key management, and centralized logging and monitoring.
Deploy, tune, and act on cloud security tooling, turning findings into fixes.
Evaluate existing cloud and on-premises infrastructure, identify gaps, misconfigurations, and technical debt, and engineer or recommend fixes.
Automate infrastructure, configuration, and remediation using infrastructure as code and scripting.
Implement guardrails and automated checks to catch misconfigurations before or soon after they reach production.
Improve monitoring, alerting, and incident response so issues are detected and resolved quickly.
Support security in deployment pipelines and container platforms where applicable.
Troubleshoot complex infrastructure and security issues across cloud and on-premises environments.
Serve as technical lead by reviewing designs and code, mentoring engineers, and explaining tradeoffs and recommendations to engineers and leadership.