AWS/EKS Platform Engineer

Job Title: AWS/EKS Platform Engineer
Location: Reston, VA (Hybrid — 1 day/week onsite; only local candidates will be considered)

Company Overview
Our client is a leading enterprise healthcare organization undertaking a major cloud transformation and platform modernization initiative.

Project Description
We are seeking an AWS Platform Engineer for a long-term contract position supporting our client in the Reston, VA area (candidates based in DC, MD, or VA preferred). This role covers the full service lifecycle — inception, design, deployment, and operations — with a strong focus on cloud-native automation, EKS provisioning, and enterprise cloud transformation.

Key Responsibilities

• Communicate architectural decisions, plans, and strategies, balancing short-term trade-offs with long-term commitments
• Engage in and improve the end-to-end lifecycle of services, from inception and design through deployment and operations
• Establish automation capabilities leveraging cloud-native solutions to improve the developer experience
• Support system design consulting, platform/framework development, capacity planning, and launch reviews
• Troubleshoot difficult issues and engage directly with the customer
• Drive systems scalability and sustainability through automation and reliability improvements
• Lead enterprise cloud transformation and migration efforts
• Guide customers on cloud-native design and architecture patterns
• Provide consultation on technology infrastructure planning and engineering
• Establish strategies to migrate legacy applications into microservices hosted on AWS
• Leverage containers, immutable infrastructure, microservices, and service mesh to build highly available, fault-tolerant applications
• Research global technology trends and their applicability to internal development teams and business initiatives
• Promote modern application design and engineering best practices across the development and operations lifecycle
• Monitor and manage stability, availability, and performance across enterprise systems and platforms (systems, network, storage, security)
• Automate end-to-end processes for patching and upgrading the AWS cloud ecosystem
• Make data-driven recommendations to improve software delivery efficiency
• Mentor peers and collaborate across teams to socialize solutions

Mandatory Skills

• Minimum of one AWS certification required
• 10+ years of IT experience, including at least 5 years in AWS Cloud, with SME-level knowledge of provisioning via automation using EKS
• AI experience required
• Strong leadership experience driving transformation initiatives
• Experience with SRE principles and transformation
• 3+ years with Kubernetes, cloud technologies (AWS, Azure), DevOps toolchain (Ansible, Jenkins, Artifactory, Bitbucket), and IaC/CI/CD patterns
• Solid understanding of software engineering (build, integration, test, release, deployment) using Python
• Experience developing and challenging engineering solutions in collaboration with peers, architects, and customers
• Hands-on experience building robust middleware environments; Linux system administration required
• Strong hands-on knowledge of AWS services including VPC, Networking, Direct Connect, Subnets, NACLs, Security Groups, EC2, S3, IAM, ELBs, Lambda, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and EKS
• Current, hands-on production-level experience in AWS Cloud
• Hands-on experience with automation and Infrastructure Provisioning (Infrastructure as Code / Policy as Code)
• Familiarity with Terraform automation, Ansible playbooks, and Python
• Experience with AWS CloudFormation and CDK required
• Hands-on experience writing Lambda functions, preferably in Python (Boto3)
• Strong Linux Bash scripting skills
• Solid understanding of DevOps toolchains, including Git/repo, Crucible, and Jenkins
• Solid understanding and experience with CI/CD toolchains

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Hands-on experience with containerization and Amazon EKS