Cloud Engineer Lead

Allied World; Woodbridge Township (NJ); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Allied World seeks a hands-on AWS DevOps Lead to own and evolve our cloud platform and to guide a blended onsite and offshore team of 5-10 engineers.

You will set the vision for AWS infrastructure, DevOps, and CI/CD, while remaining technical enough to design, build, and troubleshoot the platform. This role collaborates with IT stakeholders to cloud-enable systems securely and efficiently.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years in infrastructure, cloud, or DevOps engineering, with 5+ years of hands-on AWS experience.
• 3+ years leading technical teams, including managing contractors and onsite/offshore delivery.
• Deep expertise in AWS networking: VPC design, Transit Gateway, hybrid connectivity, DNS, and routing.
• Strong hands-on experience with core AWS compute, storage, database, and serverless services.
• Proven experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Terragrunt, CloudFormation, or CDK).
• Strong background in GitHub administration, GitHub Actions, and CI/CD pipeline design.
• Solid knowledge of AWS security services, IAM, and cloud security best practices.
• Scripting skills in Python, Bash, or PowerShell.
• Experience with containers and orchestration (Docker, ECS and/or EKS).
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Exposure to FinOps practices and cloud cost management tools.

Responsibilities

• Define the vision, roadmap, and standards for AWS infrastructure, DevOps, and CI/CD across the Platforms & Engineering team.
• Lead, mentor and grow a team of 5-10 FTEs and contractors across onsite and offshore locations.
• Plan and assign work, set priorities, track delivery and remove blockers so commitments are met on time.
• Build a culture of automation, ownership, documentation and continuous improvement.
• Manage contractor and vendor resources, including onboarding, quality of delivery and knowledge transfer.
• Design, build and maintain secure, scalable and cost-effective AWS environments (EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudFormation).
• Own the AWS network architecture: VPC design, subnets, routing, Transit Gateway, VPC peering, PrivateLink, Direct Connect; DNS, load balancing, hybrid connectivity.
• Drive Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Terragrunt and/or CloudFormation/CDK).
• Lead multi-account strategy and governance using AWS Organizations, Control Tower, landing zones.
• Ensure high availability, disaster recovery, backup, and resilience of cloud workloads.
• Monitor and optimize cloud spend through tagging, rightsizing and FinOps practices.
• Embed security in every layer of the AWS platform, working with Cybersecurity.
• Translate business needs into infrastructure designs, estimates, and delivery plans.
• Communicate status, risks, and roadmap clearly to senior leadership.

Skills

AWS networking

CI/CD design

Automation culture

Python/Bash scripting

Security in cloud

Container orchestration

FinOps

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

CDK

GitHub Actions

Docker

Job description

We are looking for a hands-on AWS DevOps Lead to own and evolve our cloud platform and lead a blended onsite and offshore team of 5-10 engineers. You will set the vision and roadmap for AWS infrastructure, DevOps, and CI/CD, while staying technical enough to design, build, and troubleshoot the platform yourself.

As part of the Platforms & Engineering team, you will partner with IT stakeholders to cloud-enable their systems, keep our AWS environment secure and well governed, and make sure the team delivers reliably. This role suits a leader who is equally comfortable whiteboarding a multi-account network design, reviewing a pipeline, and running a team stand-up.

Key responsibilities

• Define the vision, roadmap, and standards for AWS infrastructure, DevOps, and CI/CD across the Platforms & Engineering team.
• Lead, mentor and grow a team of 5-10 FTEs and contractors across onsite and offshore locations.
• Plan and assign work, set priorities, track delivery and remove blockers so commitments are met on time.
• Build a culture of automation, ownership, documentation and continuous improvement.
• Manage contractor and vendor resources, including onboarding, quality of delivery and knowledge transfer.

AWS infrastructure and architecture

• Design, build and maintain secure, scalable and cost-effective AWS environments using services such as EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, IAM, CloudWatch and CloudFormation.
• Own the AWS network architecture: VPC design, subnets, routing, Transit Gateway, VPC peering, PrivateLink, Direct Connect / site-to-site VPN, DNS (Route 53), load balancing, and hybrid connectivity.
• Drive Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Terragrunt and/or CloudFormation/CDK) as the standard for all provisioning.
• Hands-on experience authoring Terraform modules from scratch, not just consuming existing ones.
• Lead multi-account strategy and governance using AWS Organizations, Control Tower, and landing zone patterns.
• Ensure high availability, disaster recovery, backup, and resilience of cloud workloads.
• Monitor and optimize cloud spend through tagging, rightsizing and FinOps practices.

DevOps, GitHub and CI/CD

• Own GitHub administration: organizations, repositories, branching strategy, access controls and GitHub Actions.
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines that deliver fast, repeatable and secure releases.
• Standardize build, test, deployment, and release practices across teams.
• Implement observability: monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident response runbooks.
• Embed security in every layer of the AWS platform, working with the Cybersecurity team.
• Implement and manage IAM least-privilege, SCPs, KMS encryption, Secrets Manager, Security Groups, and NACLs.
• Use AWS security services such as GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, CloudTrail, Inspector, and WAF.
• Integrate DevSecOps practices into pipelines, including code, dependency, container and IaC scanning.
• Support audits, compliance requirements and remediation of security findings.
• Work closely with IT stakeholders and application owners to migrate, cloud-enable, and support their systems on AWS.
• Translate business and application needs into infrastructure designs, estimates, and delivery plans.
• Communicate status, risks, and roadmap clearly to senior leadership and partner teams.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years in infrastructure, cloud, or DevOps engineering, with 5+ years of hands-on AWS experience.
• 3+ years leading technical teams, including managing contractors and onsite/offshore delivery.
• Deep expertise in AWS networking: VPC design, Transit Gateway, hybrid connectivity, DNS, and routing.
• Strong hands-on experience with core AWS compute, storage, database, and serverless services.
• Proven experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Terragrunt, CloudFormation, or CDK).
• Strong background in GitHub administration, GitHub Actions, and CI/CD pipeline design.
• Solid knowledge of AWS security services, IAM, and cloud security best practices.
• Scripting skills in Python, Bash, or PowerShell.
• Experience with containers and orchestration (Docker, ECS and/or EKS).
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Exposure to FinOps practices and cloud cost management tools.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with Amazon Bedrock and integrating generative AI services into enterprise platforms and applications.
• Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure on AWS, such as SageMaker, vector stores, and secure model access patterns.
• AWS certifications such as Solutions Architect - Professional, DevOps Engineer - Professional, Advanced Networking - Specialty, or Security - Specialty.
• Experience in regulated industries such as financial services or insurance.
• Knowledge of security and compliance frameworks such as NIST, CIS Benchmarks, SOC 2 or ISO 27001.