Senior Cloud Data & ML Ops Lead

Karsun Solutions; Herndon (VA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

Karsun Solutions in Herndon, VA, seeks an experienced technical operations leader to own a cloud-native AWS data & AI platform for a federal program. You will oversee reliability, observability, incident response, platform engineering and data-product operationalization.

You will mentor an ops/SRE team, implement IaC/CI-CD, ensure security/compliance, and collaborate with data product owners, ML engineers, and security to deliver production-ready systems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of directly relevant IT work experience.
• 7+ years technical operations / platform / SRE; 3+ years in AWS production.
• Data products ownership: lineage, SLAs, and consumer contracts.
• Experience operating data platforms: Databricks, Airflow, S3, Kafka/Kinesis.
• Strong SRE practice knowledge: SLI/SLOs, incident response, runbooks, chaos testing.
• Hands-on with observability: Prometheus, Datadog, OpenTelemetry.
• Familiar with IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), CI/CD (GitHub Actions/Jenkins/ArgoCD), Kubernetes, scripting (Python, Bash).
• Security/compliance in federal environments.

Responsibilities

• Serve as primary technical owner for platform availability, reliability, and runbook development for data pipelines and model serving.
• Work with SRE Lead to design and operationalize SRE practices (SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, toil reduction) to transition to SRE.
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability across data/AI stacks with metrics, tracing, and logging.
• Lead incident management: on-call rotations, RCA, remediation tracking, and continuous improvement.
• Automate workflows (deployments, scaling, recovery) using IaC and CI/CD; reduce manual toil.
• Define runbooks, backup/restore, RTO/RPO, and disaster recovery for data/ML systems.
• Partner with data product owners, ML engineers, security, and compliance for production readiness.
• Manage capacity planning, cost optimization, and performance tuning of AWS resources.
• Mentor and lead an ops/SRE team; coordinate cross-functional platform changes.
• Maintain vendor and third-party integrations; coordinate upgrades under change-control processes.
• Track reliability metrics and report improvements to stakeholders.
• Maintain eligibility to obtain a Public Trust clearance.

Skills

Platform ops

SRE practices

AWS production

Observability

IaC

CI/CD

Security/compliance

Incident management

Tools

Databricks

Airflow

S3

Kafka/Kinesis

Prometheus

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

Terraform

CloudFormation

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

ArgoCD

EKS/Kubernetes

Python

Bash

Job description

Karsun Solutions in Herndon, VA, seeks an experienced technical operations leader to own a cloud-native AWS data & AI platform for a federal program. You will oversee reliability, observability, incident response, platform engineering and data-product operationalization.

You will mentor an ops/SRE team, implement IaC/CI-CD, ensure security/compliance, and collaborate with data product owners, ML engineers, and security to deliver production-ready systems.