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