Lead Cloud Engineer (Security / SRE)

Ignite•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 lead will build, operate, and secure cloud infrastructure in a hybrid environment built on AWS GovCloud, helping ensure reliability and security at national scale. The work combines evaluating existing cloud and on-premises environments with hands-on engineering to address gaps. The engineer will also provide technical leadership to other engineers. The role focuses on securely configuring cloud services—including identity and access, network controls, encryption, logging, and security tooling—and automating infrastructure, configuration, and remediation. The position is hybrid and based in the Washington, DC area.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship is required.
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 securely configuring AWS services, 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 their findings.
Experience automating AWS infrastructure and operations through infrastructure as code, such as Terraform or CloudFormation, 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, where applicable, Azure, 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 and tune cloud security tools and act on their findings to implement 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.