Senior Cloud Systems Owner

Leidos is seeking Senior Cloud Systems Owners to join the Air Traffic Business Area within the Homeland Sector, supporting the development of next-generation flight service and air traffic systems. This work aligns with the FAA's broader initiative to modernize legacy flight service capabilities, replacing aging infrastructure with scalable, cloud-based platforms designed to improve safety and operational efficiency—particularly in remote and high-dependency aviation environments. These efforts focus on delivering mission-critical, future-ready solutions that provide safety-critical flight services to the pilot community.

Please note, this exciting position is currently unfunded and is in anticipation of future work.

In this position, you will serve as a Senior Cloud Systems Owner responsible for the technical leadership, architecture, and operational management of one or more enterprise cloud-hosted environments supporting Agile software development teams and production systems. You will lead the design and evolution of cloud infrastructure, establish platform engineering standards, and ensure environments remain secure, resilient, scalable, and operationally ready throughout the software lifecycle. Working closely with software engineers, systems engineers, cybersecurity personnel, DevSecOps engineers, Product Owners, and solution architects, you will help deliver reliable cloud platforms that enable mission-critical FAA applications.

This position supports government programs and requires the ability to obtain and maintain a favorable Public Trust investigation.

Primary Responsibilities

• Lead the design, deployment, administration, and lifecycle management of cloud infrastructure supporting development, integration, testing, and production environments.
• Provide technical leadership for Kubernetes platform administration, including cluster architecture, node lifecycle management, networking, RBAC, storage, upgrades, scalability, and operational health.
• Establish and maintain Kubernetes platform standards including ingress controllers, network policies, storage classes, cluster-wide Helm deployments, and platform security configurations.
• Develop and govern Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and/or AWS CloudFormation, creating reusable modules and establishing infrastructure standards across multiple environments.
• Design and manage AWS cloud services including networking, compute, storage, identity, and security services to support highly available and resilient systems.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure automation using Ansible, Bash, Python, or similar technologies to improve provisioning, operational consistency, system health, and compliance.
• Lead Linux platform administration including operating system lifecycle management, storage management, patching, hardening, and performance optimization.
• Design and implement identity and access management solutions using AWS IAM, Kubernetes RBAC, Active Directory, LDAP, or related technologies.
• Manage secrets, certificates, encryption keys, and PKI assets using AWS Secrets Manager, AWS KMS, HashiCorp Vault, or similar technologies while ensuring compliance with organizational security requirements.
• Lead troubleshooting and root cause analysis of complex infrastructure, networking, Kubernetes, and cloud platform issues across multiple environments.
• Monitor platform health, capacity, availability, performance, and operational metrics while implementing proactive improvements to increase system reliability and resilience.
• Collaborate with DevSecOps teams to ensure cloud platforms effectively support automated software deployment, operational monitoring, and security objectives.
• Partner with software engineering, systems engineering, and cybersecurity teams to evaluate infrastructure requirements and implement scalable platform solutions.
• Develop and maintain cloud architecture documentation, operational procedures, disaster recovery plans, platform standards, and implementation guidance.
• Mentor Cloud Systems Owners and provide technical leadership on cloud engineering best practices across Agile teams.
• Evaluate emerging cloud technologies and recommend improvements that enhance platform security, reliability, operational efficiency, and maintainability.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field with 8–12 years of relevant experience, or Master's degree with 6–10 years of experience.
• Extensive experience administering enterprise AWS or GCP cloud environments.
• Advanced experience designing, deploying, and administering Kubernetes clusters in production environments.
• Extensive experience developing Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and/or AWS CloudFormation.
• Experience designing secure, scalable, and highly available cloud infrastructure.
• Strong experience automating infrastructure provisioning and configuration management using Ansible or comparable technologies.
• Strong Linux administration experience including system hardening, storage management, and performance tuning.
• Experience developing automation using Bash, Python, or similar scripting languages.
• Strong understanding of Git version control and infrastructure-as-code workflows.
• Advanced knowledge of networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, DNS, routing, load balancing, firewalls, AWS VPC networking, security groups, and network ACLs.
• Experience implementing identity and access management, RBAC, secrets management, PKI, TLS/SSL, and cloud security best practices.
• Experience collaborating with software development and DevSecOps teams supporting cloud-native application environments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and establish engineering standards.
• Ability to obtain an SF-85 Public Trust suitability determination.
• US Citizenship.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting FAA or DoD systems.
• Knowledge of DevSecOps practices and cloud-native software delivery methodologies.
• Experience supporting highly available, mission-critical cloud environments.
• Experience with observability platforms, centralized logging, metrics collection, distributed tracing, and operational dashboards.
• Experience implementing disaster recovery, backup, and business continuity strategies for cloud platforms.
• Experience optimizing cloud infrastructure for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Experience with enterprise Kubernetes platforms such as Amazon EKS or Google Kubernetes Engine.
• AWS Professional, Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD), Terraform Associate, or comparable cloud certifications.
• Experience with cloud governance, operational readiness reviews, and platform lifecycle management.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.