Senior Cloud Engineer

i4DM•Millersville, MD

About The Position

We are seeking an experienced Senior Cloud Engineer to serve as a hands-on technical lead supporting the delivery of a cloud-native, event-driven platform built on AWS. This role will work closely with the Solution Architect to implement a Kafka/MSK-based event bus, RPC-driven core services, and real-time WebSocket-driven user experiences. The Senior Cloud Engineer will guide engineering teams, drive design decisions, and ensure alignment with DevSecOps and VA enterprise standards.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in cloud engineering, software engineering, or related roles within enterprise environments.
Strong experience with AWS cloud services and cloud-native architectures.
Hands-on experience with Kafka or AWS MSK (required).
Experience designing and implementing event-driven architectures and distributed systems.
Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
Experience implementing real-time streaming or WebSocket-based systems.
Strong understanding of DevSecOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.
Ability to lead technical efforts and mentor junior engineers.
Eligible to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance.

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting VA or other Federal environments and familiarity with enterprise compliance standards.
Experience with Appian or integration with low-code platforms.
Experience with observability and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).
Understanding of healthcare interoperability or scheduling systems is a plus.
Support Agile delivery and participate in design reviews, sprint planning, and technical discussions.

Responsibilities

Design and implement cloud-native microservices supporting RPC-based appointment and scheduling workflows.
Develop and maintain Kafka/MSK event producers and consumers to support event-driven data flows.
Implement and manage event routing patterns including topic segmentation, schema versioning, and replay strategies.
Build and integrate real-time WebSocket-based streaming solutions enabling live UI updates without refresh.
Implement dead-letter queue handling, retry strategies, and resiliency patterns for event processing.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to support interoperability with external healthcare and VA systems.
Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation using Terraform, Jenkins, and Packer.
Deploy and manage containerized applications using Kubernetes and Docker.
Implement observability solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, and Kibana.
Ensure secure system design leveraging Vault, IAM, and Zero Trust principles.
Support Agile delivery and participate in design reviews, sprint planning, and technical discussions.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering team members.
Drive design decisions for event schemas, integration patterns, and streaming architectures.
Ensure adherence to architecture standards, coding practices, and DevSecOps processes.
Identify risks and performance bottlenecks and implement optimizations for scalability and reliability.