Senior Cloud Engineer

Illumination Works LLC• US,

14d•Remote

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior Cloud Engineer to design, build, and maintain serverless workloads on AWS that power a distributed, event-driven platform. This role demands an action-oriented professional who can quickly absorb and independently execute technical solutions while providing architectural guidance and contributing to the overall system design. We value passion, curiosity, and perseverance with an ability to communicate ideas and results to diverse audiences. We look for people who thrive in collaborative and independent assignments, have the aptitude to learn new data quickly, and who are willing to mentor junior team members.

Requirements

4+ years of professional cloud or software engineering experience, with 2+ years building production AWS serverless workloads.
Strong Python proficiency, including pytest, packaging, and async patterns.
Hands-on CloudFormation experience leveraging Stacks and StackSets.
Demonstrated experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines that deploy infrastructure, application code, and provision managed services.
Working knowledge of event-driven architecture patterns and the trade-offs between EventBridge, SNS, SQS, and Kinesis.
Practical understanding of AWS IAM, VPC networking, KMS, and least-privilege design for serverless workloads.
Experience producing design documentation and driving technical decisions from ambiguous requirements.
Light web application development experience sufficient to build internal tools, admin UIs, or thin frontends that integrate with serverless APIs.
Must hold an active security clearance
CompTIA Security+ certification
Acceptable candidates must successfully pass a drug test and background screen

Nice To Haves

AWS GovCloud experience and familiarity with FedRAMP, DoD IL4/IL5, or other regulated environments.
Experience designing and deploying agentic AI workloads on Amazon Bedrock, including Bedrock Agents, Knowledge Bases, and tool/function calling integrated with serverless backends (Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge).
Strong background in secure authentication and authorization design with a least-privilege mindset, including PKI and mTLS, AWS IAM roles and policies, OAuth 2.0 flows, OIDC, JWT validation, and federated identity patterns (SAML, IAM Identity Center).
Performance and cost tuning for high throughput serverless workloads
Additional certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate or Professional) or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer.
Experience contributing to internal developer platforms or shared tooling.

Responsibilities

Design and implement serverless workloads on AWS using Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, SQS, SNS, Step Functions, DynamoDB, and S3.
Author and maintain CloudFormation (YAML) templates as the source of truth for infrastructure, including nested stacks, change sets, and drift detection.
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that lint, test, package, and deploy CloudFormation stacks and code across environments with defined promotion and rollback strategies.
Develop Python based Lambda functions, internal tooling, and automation with appropriate testing, logging, error handling, and dependency management.
Provide architecture guidance for distributed event-driven systems, including choreography vs. orchestration, idempotency, delivery semantics, dead-letter and replay strategies, and schema evolution.
Define event contracts and async integration patterns in partnership with application teams.
Implement observability across services: structured logging, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), metrics, and actionable alarms.
Participate in incident response and post-incident reviews and convert findings into automated guardrails and runbooks.
Conduct code and design reviews; mentor junior and mid-level engineers on serverless patterns, IaC standards, and operational practices.