Senior Azure Cloud Engineer – Federal, Hybrid (DC)

Lightfeather Io Llc; Washington, Northern (District of Columbia, KY); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

LightFeather is seeking a Senior Cloud Engineer specializing in Microsoft Azure to design, implement, and manage secure cloud solutions for federal IT environments. Hybrid role with four days on-site in Washington, DC and one day telework.

Salary $130,000–$170,000 annually, with US citizenship clearance requirements. The role emphasizes Azure infrastructure, IaC with Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, and strong security/compliance practices aligned with FedRAMP, NIST, and RMF.

Qualifications

• Active Secret or higher clearance.
• 3+ years of Azure Cloud Engineering experience.
• 3+ years of CI/CD pipelines experience.
• 3+ years of Terraform for IaC.
• 3+ years of GitLab.
• 4+ years PowerShell scripting.
• 5+ years in Cloud Engineering, DevOps, or Systems Engineering.
• Strong hands-on experience with Azure core services.
• Proficiency with Terraform, PowerShell, and GitLab CI/CD.
• Hands-on experience with Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD).
• Understanding of FedRAMP, NIST, RMF.
• Ability to work on-site in Washington, DC four days per week.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and maintain Azure cloud infrastructure (VMs, VNets, Storage, Azure AD, PaaS).
• Manage and optimize Azure networking components (VNets, NSGs, Load Balancers, VPN/ExpressRoute).
• Develop and maintain Terraform templates as IaC.
• Support automation via PowerShell, Bash, YAML/JSON, and GitLab pipelines.
• Deploy, configure, and manage AVD environments.
• Provide troubleshooting and performance optimization for AVD users.
• Build, maintain, and troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines in GitLab.
• Automate cloud operations, system configuration, and monitoring tasks.
• Implement secure cloud practices (RBAC, Key Vault, IAM, encryption).
• Ensure compliance with NIST, RMF, FedRAMP and agency controls.
• Use Azure Monitor, Log Analytics to analyze health and enforce SLAs.
• Collaborate with engineering, security, and program staff for cloud modernization.
• Support onsite collaboration with customer stakeholders; role not remote long-term.

Skills

Azure Cloud Engineering

CI/CD pipelines

Terraform

GitLab

PowerShell scripting

Azure Virtual Desktop

Security/compliance

On-site collaboration

Networking (Azure)

Tools

Terraform

GitLab

PowerShell

Job description

LightFeather is seeking a Senior Cloud Engineer specializing in Microsoft Azure to design, implement, and manage secure cloud solutions for federal IT environments. Hybrid role with four days on-site in Washington, DC and one day telework.

Salary $130,000–$170,000 annually, with US citizenship clearance requirements. The role emphasizes Azure infrastructure, IaC with Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, and strong security/compliance practices aligned with FedRAMP, NIST, and RMF.