Job Title: AWS Cloud Data Platform Administrator.
Location: Raritan, NJ (On-site – 4 days per week).
Employment Type: Contract (W2 through ZipStaff — No C2C or 1099).
About the Opportunity:
ZipStaff is seeking an experienced AWS Cloud Data Platform Administrator to manage, secure, automate, and optimize enterprise-grade data platforms hosted on AWS for a global technology services firm.
The role is accountable for platform availability, performance, governance, cost efficiency, and operational excellence across data engineering, analytics, and integration services.
The ideal candidate brings strong AWS administration expertise, hands-on experience with modern data platforms, and a proven ability to support business-critical workloads in production environments. This is an on-site role in Raritan, NJ (4 days per week in the office).
What You’ll Do:
- Administer and support AWS-based data platforms across development, test, staging, and production environments.
- Manage services such as Amazon S3, Redshift, RDS/Aurora, Glue, EMR, Athena, Lake Formation, Kinesis, Lambda, DMS, Step Functions, and CloudWatch.
- Provision and configure cloud resources using infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS CDK.
- Implement identity and access controls using IAM roles, policies, permission boundaries, AWS Organizations, and service control policies.
- Monitor platform health, capacity, job execution, data pipelines, storage, and query performance; proactively identify and resolve issues.
- Perform incident, problem, change, release, and service-request management in accordance with defined SLAs and ITIL practices.
- Optimize Redshift clusters, Spark/EMR workloads, storage tiers, data transfer, and compute consumption for performance and cost.
- Implement backup, recovery, high-availability, business-continuity, and disaster-recovery controls; conduct periodic restoration and failover tests.
- Secure data using encryption, key management, private networking, secrets management, logging, vulnerability remediation, and least-privilege access.
- Enable data governance through cataloging, lineage, classification, access auditing, retention, and lifecycle-management controls.
- Build operational automation using Python, Shell scripting, AWS CLI, SDKs, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Maintain platform standards, runbooks, architecture diagrams, configuration records, SOPs, troubleshooting guides, and audit evidence.
- Partner with data engineers, architects, security teams, application teams, FinOps, and business stakeholders on onboarding, migrations, upgrades, and capacity planning.
- Provide technical leadership, mentor junior administrators, coordinate vendor support, and drive root-cause analysis and continuous improvement.
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
- 7+ years of overall experience in cloud infrastructure, data platform administration, database administration, or data engineering operations.
- At least 4 years of hands-on experience supporting AWS environments, including production data and analytics workloads.
- Strong hands-on administration experience with AWS data analytics, compute, storage, networking, security, and monitoring services.
- Deep understanding of data lake, data warehouse, lakehouse, batch-processing, and streaming architectures.
- Experience administering Amazon Redshift (workload management, query tuning, distribution and sort strategies, scaling, snapshots, and security).
- Experience with AWS Glue (Data Catalog, crawlers, jobs, workflows) and Lake Formation permissions.
- Working knowledge of Apache Spark and Amazon EMR administration, troubleshooting, scaling, and performance tuning.
- Strong knowledge of Amazon S3 design (bucket policies, lifecycle rules, versioning, replication, encryption, and access controls).
- Proficiency in IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, VPC, security groups, private endpoints, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, AWS Config, and GuardDuty.
- Experience with Terraform or CloudFormation and CI/CD tools such as AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or GitLab CI/CD.
- Proficiency in Python and Shell scripting for administration, monitoring, deployment, and remediation automation.
- Strong SQL skills and familiarity with relational databases, data modeling, ETL/ELT patterns, and data integration.
- Knowledge of observability, log analytics, backup, disaster recovery, patching, and production-support practices.
- Understanding of cloud cost-management practices (tagging standards, budgets, usage analysis, and rightsizing).
- Demonstrated experience operating highly available, secure, and scalable enterprise platforms.
- Strong troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, documentation, communication, and stakeholder-management skills.
- Ability to participate in on-call support and planned maintenance activities when required.
- Ability to work on-site in Raritan, NJ (4 days per week).
Preferred Qualifications:
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional.
- AWS Certified Data Engineer.
- Experience with additional AWS services such as EC2, EKS, Lambda, and CloudWatch for performance monitoring.
- Background supporting large-scale data platform operations in complex enterprise environments.
Benefits:
- Health Insurance.
- Dental Insurance.
- Vision Insurance.
- 401(k) + 401(k) matching.
- Paid time off.
- Referral Program.
About ZipStaff
ZipStaff partners with leading organizations to connect skilled technology professionals with high-impact contract opportunities. We focus on quality matches, clear communication, and long-term success for candidates and clients.
To apply, submit your resume highlighting your 7+ years of cloud/data platform administration experience, 4+ years of hands-on AWS data and analytics platform support (Redshift, Glue, EMR, S3, Lake Formation), and production operations background. Pure research or junior experience will not be considered.