Cloud / Deployment Engineer (Nigeria)-Contract

Talent Hackers, LLC; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Talent Hackers, LLC is seeking a Cloud & Infrastructure Engineer to design, secure, and operate scalable cloud platforms. You will work with managed PaaS and AWS services, building out CI/CD pipelines, observability, and security controls to deliver reliable cloud environments.

The role emphasizes infrastructure as code, automated deployments, and cost awareness across development, staging, and production. Collaboration with developers and project leads will be essential for success.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of engineering experience.
• Experience with PaaS platforms and AWS services (RDS, S3, Lambda).
• Proficient in infrastructure as code and CI/CD.
• Experience configuring transactional email deliverability.
• Ability to implement IAM, secrets management, and network security.

Responsibilities

• Assess current infra and produce prioritized findings.
• Define target infra across PaaS and AWS with environment separation.
• Define re-usable infrastructure as code for all environments.
• Implement IAM roles, secrets management, and network controls.
• Configure transactional email delivery and domain authentication.
• Develop CI/CD pipelines with automated tests, migrations, and rollback.
• Establish observability, monitoring, and cost tagging.

Skills

Cloud engineering

CI/CD pipelines

AWS services

Infrastructure as code

Serverless / Lambda

Security & compliance

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

CDK

Pulumi

GitHub Actions

Job description

Job Overview

We’re looking for a Cloud & Infrastructure Engineer to build, secure, and maintain scalable platform infrastructure and delivery pipelines. The ideal candidate combines hands‑on experience with managed PaaS platforms and core AWS services (RDS, S3, Lambda) with strong capabilities in Infrastructure as Code, automated CI/CD, and transactional email deliverability. This role will collaborate closely with project leads and software engineers, establish comprehensive observability and security controls, and deliver reliable, automated, and well‑documented cloud environments.

Core Tasks

1. Cloud architecture and platform

• Assess the current infrastructure — what is running, how it is configured, what is manual, and where the risk sits — and produce a written assessment with prioritized findings.
• Define and implement the target infrastructure across PaaS platform, e.g., Heroku, Render, Elastic Beanstalk, App Runner and supporting AWS services, with environment separation for dev / staging / production.
• Define infrastructure as code so environments are reproducible rather than hand-configured. Terraform / CloudFormation / CDK / Pulumi, as agreed.
• Implement IAM roles and least-privilege access, secrets management, and network configuration (VPC, security groups, TLS).

2. Data and storage layer

• RDS: provision and tune the database — instance sizing, parameter groups, connection pooling, read replicas if warranted — and configure automated backups, point-in-time recovery, and encryption at rest.
• Run and document a restore test. A backup that has never been restored is not a backup.
• S3: configure buckets for uploads / assets / exports / logs with correct access policies, lifecycle rules, versioning, and encryption. No public buckets that should not be public.
• Set up CDN delivery for static and user-uploaded assets where appropriate.

3. Serverless and background processing

• Lambda: build and deploy the functions in scope — e.g., scheduled jobs, event‑driven processing, webhook handlers, image or file processing — with appropriate triggers, concurrency limits, and timeouts.
• Handle failure properly: retries, dead‑letter queues, idempotency, and alerting on repeated failure.
• Bring Lambda deployments into the same CI/CD pipeline and IaC definitions as the rest of the stack, not a separate manual path.

4. Email and outbound messaging

• SMTP services: configure transactional email through SES / SendGrid / Postmark / other for e.g., account, notification, and system emails.
• Set up domain authentication — SPF, DKIM, DMARC — and manage sending reputation, warmup, and dedicated IP if warranted.
• Configure bounce, complaint, and suppression handling, plus deliverability monitoring so a drop in inbox placement is visible before users report it.

5. CI/CD and release engineering

• Build pipelines in GitHub Actions / GitLab CI / CircleCI / other that run tests, lint, build, and deploy on merge, with environment promotion from staging to production.
• Implement deployment strategy and rollback: blue‑green / rolling / canary, as agreed, with a rollback that is a single documented action rather than an improvisation.
• Automate database migrations as part of deploy, safely and reversibly.
• Reduce pipeline runtime so the team is not waiting on it.

6. Observability, security, and cost

• Set up centralized logging, metrics, and alerting through CloudWatch / Datadog / other, with alerts that page on real problems and stay quiet otherwise.
• Define and monitor the health indicators that matter for the team: uptime, error rate, latency, queue depth, job failure.
• Review the stack against HIPAA / PCI / SOC 2 / other requirements where applicable, and document what is in place and what is not.
• Establish cost visibility and tagging; identify and remove waste.

Deliverables

• Infrastructure assessment with prioritized findings, reviewed with project lead.
• Architecture diagram of the target infrastructure, with data flow and trust boundaries.
• Infrastructure as code covering all environments, in repository.
• Configured and hardened RDS, S3, Lambda, and PaaS environments, with a documented and tested restore procedure.
• Transactional email configured and authenticated, with deliverability monitoring in place.
• CI/CD pipelines deploying dev / staging / production with automated tests, migrations, and one‑step rollback.
• Monitoring, logging, and alerting, with an on‑call runbook covering the top failure modes and what to do about each.
• Cost baseline and tagging scheme, with identified savings.
• Handoff package: infrastructure documentation, access inventory, known limitations, recommended next steps, and a walkthrough with the team.

Must Haves

• 3+ years of engineering experience
• PaaS - production experience running applications on a managed platform, and clear judgment about where the platform’s abstractions stop being enough.
• AWS RDS - provisioning, tuning, backup and recovery, and diagnosing the database problems that surface as application slowness.
• AWS S3 - bucket policies, lifecycle management, encryption, and secure handling of user‑uploaded content.
• AWS Lambda - building, deploying, and operating serverless functions, including their less obvious failure modes.
• SMTP services - configuring transactional email, domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and deliverability management.
• CI/CD - you have built pipelines a team actually relied on, and have made deploying boring for people who were previously nervous about it.

Nice to Haves

• Infrastructure as code at depth in Terraform / CloudFormation / CDK.
• Containers and orchestration where the stack calls for it.
• Experience with HIPAA / PCI / SOC 2 compliance in a cloud environment.
• Domain experience in medical software and/or e-commerce.
• Prior contract work where you owned infrastructure end to end and handed it off cleanly.