Senior DevOps Engineer – US Federal, AWS GovCloud

Jobtailor; Washington (District of Columbia, WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor in Washington, DC seeks a senior DevOps/Cloud Infrastructure leader to own the US GovCloud environment for federal workloads. You will build from scratch, define security controls, and run audits to maintain FedRAMP readiness while guiding architecture decisions.

Responsibilities include leading Terraform IaC, EKS hardening, CI/CD with SBOMs, incident response, and on-call coverage. You will grow and mentor the federal infra team, partner with auditors and prime contractors, and ensure

Qualifications

• 7+ years in DevOps, SRE, or cloud infrastructure engineering.
• At least 3 years of hands-on AWS GovCloud (US) experience.
• Eligible for an active US government security clearance, Secret minimum.
• US citizenship.
• Experience leading FedRAMP authorization or GovCloud migrations.
• Production Kubernetes experience (EKS).
• Strong audit and control-by-control capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Build and manage AWS GovCloud environments and governance.
• Lead migration of federal workloads into GovCloud.
• Own Terraform IaC, policy-as-code, and drift detection.
• Operate hardened EKS workloads with security controls.
• Establish logging, incident response, and on-call for federal env.
• Collaborate with CISO, 3PAO, and prime contractors on readiness.
• Hire and lead the US federal infrastructure team.

Skills

AWS GovCloud Experience

FedRAMP Authorization Leadership

Terraform Expertise

Production Kubernetes

People Management

Education

Active US Government Security Clearance

TS/SCI Clearance

Tools

AWS IAM

KMS

VPC Design

GuardDuty

Security Hub

Config

CloudTrail

Terraform Modules

Kubernetes Security

Agentic Tooling

Job description

• Build the entire AWS GovCloud environment from scratch, including account and Organizations structure, networking, identity, encryption, logging, boundary protection and supporting services
• Own the federal environment in production, including availability, security posture, patch state, cost and audit readiness
• Lead the end-to-end migration of federal workloads into GovCloud, including planning, sequencing, cutover, validation and rollback criteria
• Conduct internal control-by-control audits, gap analysis, findings and remediation planning
• Define and defend the FedRAMP authorization boundary with data-flow diagrams, inventory and technical control evidence
• Own Terraform infrastructure as code, drift detection, policy-as-code guardrails and reproducible builds
• Build and operate hardened EKS workloads, including workload identity, admission control, patching and upgrades
• Build FedRAMP-compliant CI/CD with separated pipelines, signed artifacts, SBOMs, provenance and controlled promotion paths
• Implement continuous monitoring and monthly ConMon reporting, including vulnerability scanning, POA&A managing, deviation requests and significant change requests
• Establish centralized logging, audit-trail integrity, alerting, incident response and on-call for the federal environment
• Work with the CISO, 3PAO and prime contractors on assessment readiness, evidence collection, SSP maintenance and SPRS scoring
• Establish operational runbooks, DR/BCP procedures and RPO/RTO validation
• Apply agentic tooling to infrastructure and compliance work with human gates and audit trails
• Hire, onboard and lead the US federal infrastructure team, setting technical standards and on-call culture

Requirements

• 7+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform or cloud infrastructure engineering
• At least 3 years of hands-on AWS GovCloud (US) experience
• Experience leading a FedRAMP authorization and/or commercial-to-GovCloud migration end to end
• Ability to conduct a full control-by-control audit of an environment built by the candidate, produce defensible findings and evidence, and close gaps
• Eligible for an active US Government security clearance, Secret minimum, currently in scope and transferable
• US citizenship
• Deep AWS expertise, including IAM, permission boundaries, KMS, VPC design, private connectivity, GuardDuty, Security Hub, Config, CloudTrail and log integrity
• Expert-level Terraform, including module design and multi-account state management
• Production Kubernetes experience, preferably EKS, including security hardening and upgrade management
• Daily use of coding agents and agentic workflows, with judgment about when automated output requires a human gate
• Track record of shipping working infrastructure in weeks and becoming productive quickly in unfamiliar codebases and organizations
• People management experience, including hiring, onboarding, performance management and technical mentorship
• Comfortable serving as the senior technical voice with auditors, assessors and prime contractor security teams
• Preferred: TS/SCI clearance
• Preferred: CMMC Level 2 assessment experience, SSP authorship and SPRS submission
• Preferred: DoD or IC customer experience or subcontractor experience under DFARS 252.204-7012 flowdowns
• Preferred: DISA STIGs, DoD SRG impact levels IL4/IL5 or AWS Secret Region familiarity
• Preferred: SingleStore (MemSQL) deployment, operation or migration experience
• Preferred: restricted-environment data platform experience, such as MongoDB Atlas for Government
• Preferred: commercial-to-federal codebase separation and release management experience

Core Competencies

Demonstrates extensive expertise in AWS GovCloud environment management, including FedRAMP compliance, Terraform infrastructure as code, and production Kubernetes operations. Proven ability to lead federal workload migrations, conduct thorough audits, and manage a high-performing infrastructure team.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• AWS GovCloud Experience
• FedRAMP Authorization Leadership
• Expert-Level Terraform Skills
• Production Kubernetes Management
• People Management Experience

ATS Optimization Keywords

Hard Skills

• AWS IAM
• AWS KMS
• AWS VPC Design
• AWS GuardDuty
• AWS Security Hub
• AWS Config
• AWS CloudTrail
• Terraform Module Design
• Kubernetes Security Hardening
• Control Audits

Soft Skills

• Technical Mentorship
• Performance Management
• Communication with Auditors

Certifications & Qualifications

• Active US Government Security Clearance
• TS/SCI Clearance (Preferred)

Industry Keywords

• FedRAMP Compliance
• CMMC Level 2 Assessment
• SSP Authorship
• SPRS Submission
• DoD SRG Impact Levels
• DISA STIGs
• Restricted-Environment Data Platforms

Tools & Technologies

• EKS
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Agentic Tooling
• Centralized Logging
• Incident Response