AWS Solutions Architect

AWS Solutions Architect – Cloud Security & DevOps

Position Summary

The AWS Solutions Architect – Security & DevOps is responsible for designing, implementing, securing, and optimizing enterprise cloud solutions that support the mission and operational objectives. This role combines advanced AWS architecture expertise with cloud security engineering, DevSecOps automation, infrastructure as code, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices.

The architect will develop secure, scalable, resilient, and cost-effective cloud environments that support programs, healthcare information systems, public health initiatives, and mission-critical applications. The position requires a strong understanding of federal information security requirements, including the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA), Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) frameworks, and applicable security policies.

The ideal candidate possesses AWS Solutions Architect certification, AWS security and DevOps certifications, and demonstrated experience implementing cloud architectures that integrate security, compliance, automation, and operational excellence throughout the software development lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities

1. AWS Cloud Architecture and Engineering

• Design and implement secure, highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable AWS cloud architectures supporting enterprise applications and workloads.

• Develop cloud infrastructure solutions using services such as Amazon EC2, S3, VPC, IAM, Lambda, RDS, EKS, CloudFront, Route 53, and AWS Organizations.

• Establish cloud landing zones, account structures, network segmentation, connectivity, and multi-account governance strategies.

• Design disaster recovery, business continuity, backup, and resilience solutions aligned with mission and recovery requirements.

• Evaluate cloud architecture designs for performance, reliability, security, maintainability, and cost optimization.

• Provide technical leadership and architectural guidance to cloud engineers, DevOps teams, security personnel, developers, and program stakeholders.

2. Cloud Security and Compliance

• Design and implement security controls aligned with NIST SP 800-53, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, FISMA, FedRAMP, and applicable policies.

• Apply AWS security best practices, including least-privilege access, identity federation, role-based access control, encryption, network isolation, and centralized logging.

• Implement and manage AWS IAM, AWS KMS, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Inspector.

• Integrate security controls and automated compliance checks into cloud infrastructure provisioning and application deployment pipelines.

• Support security assessments, risk assessments, vulnerability management, remediation tracking, and Authority to Operate (ATO) activities.

• Collaborate with Information System Security Officers (ISSOs), Information System Security Managers (ISSMs), security operations teams, and compliance stakeholders to maintain security documentation and evidence.

• Implement continuous monitoring, security alerting, incident response procedures, and audit-ready logging.

• Support protection of sensitive government and healthcare information, including personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI), where applicable.

3. DevOps and DevSecOps Engineering

• Design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines that automate application builds, testing, security scanning, deployments, and releases.

• Use AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, or comparable automation platforms.

• Develop infrastructure as code using Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS CDK.

• Implement automated testing, configuration validation, policy enforcement, and security gates throughout the deployment lifecycle.

• Integrate static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), software composition analysis (SCA), container image scanning, and secret detection into delivery pipelines.

• Establish repeatable deployment patterns across development, testing, staging, and production environments.

• Implement version control, release management, rollback procedures, deployment approvals, and environment promotion controls.

• Promote collaboration between development, operations, security, and compliance teams through DevSecOps practices.

4. Infrastructure Automation and Configuration Management

• Automate provisioning, configuration, patching, and lifecycle management of AWS resources.

• Develop reusable infrastructure modules and standardized templates to improve consistency and reduce manual configuration errors.

• Implement configuration drift detection, automated remediation, tagging standards, and policy-as-code controls.

• Support containerized workloads using Docker, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and Kubernetes where appropriate.

• Develop automation scripts using Python, Bash, PowerShell, or similar scripting languages.

• Establish repeatable, secure infrastructure deployment practices that support federal compliance requirements.

5. Monitoring, Reliability, and Incident Management

• Implement centralized monitoring, metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting using Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS X-Ray, and compatible observability platforms.

• Troubleshoot cloud infrastructure, network connectivity, application performance, deployment failures, and security events.

• Lead or support root-cause analysis and corrective actions for cloud service incidents.

• Develop operational runbooks, standard operating procedures, escalation processes, and recovery procedures.

• Establish service reliability measures, availability targets, recovery time objectives (RTOs), and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

• Support incident response, vulnerability remediation, and continuous improvement of cloud operations.

6. Governance, Cost Optimization, and Stakeholder Collaboration

• Implement AWS governance standards, tagging policies, resource controls, and account-level guardrails.

• Monitor cloud consumption and optimize costs using AWS Cost Explorer, budgets, rightsizing, and appropriate purchasing models.

• Maintain architecture diagrams, technical specifications, security documentation, deployment procedures, and operational guides.

• Participate in architecture reviews, technical planning sessions, change control boards, and security assessments.

• Translate business and mission requirements into secure, supportable, and scalable technical solutions.

• Mentor cloud engineers and DevOps practitioners and promote cloud architecture standards across project teams.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Cybersecurity, Software Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience where permitted by the position requirements.

• Five or more years of experience in cloud architecture, cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, or related IT roles.

• Three or more years of hands-on experience designing, deploying, and supporting AWS environments.

• Demonstrated experience designing secure cloud architectures for enterprise or regulated environments.

• Strong knowledge of AWS networking, IAM, compute, storage, databases, monitoring, security, and governance services.

• Practical experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, automation, and version control.

• Experience implementing cloud security controls and supporting compliance assessments or audit activities.

• Working knowledge of NIST security standards, FISMA, FedRAMP, and federal information security practices.

• Experience with scripting or automation using Python, Bash, PowerShell, or similar tools.

• Strong troubleshooting, technical documentation, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.