Cloud Application Engineer

Clearance Level None Category IT Infrastructure and Operations

Location

Remote Working from the USA Key

Skills

For Success Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) Certificate Management Internet Information Server (IIS) Administration NIST 800-53 REQRQ225393 Public TrustNACLC (T3) Requisition TypeRegular Your Impact Own your opportunity to be on the frontlines of health innovation. Deliver for America’s health agency missions and enhance lives for hundreds of millions every day.

Job Description

- GDIT is your place. You make it your own by bringing your ideas and unique perspective to our culture. By owning your opportunity at GDIT you are helping us ensure today is safe and tomorrow is smarter. We are seeking a Cloud Application Engineer to join our team supporting the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). At GDIT people are our differentiator. As a Cloud Application Engineer you will help run and modernize the hosting platform behind NIAID's scientific and business applications — a hybrid estate spanning AWS and Windows supporting research into infectious and immunologic disease. You will define infrastructure in Terraform rather than in tickets ship it through GitHub and instrument what you build so the team knows something is wrong before a researcher does. You will also help move the remaining on-prem Windows workloads into AWS and improve them once they land. We will want your opinion on operational processes deployment patterns tooling and where the platform should go next. A focus on always-up always-available applications is a plus. In this role a typical day will include the following Deploying hardening and troubleshooting Windows applications on Windows Server and IIS — including .NET workloads TLS certificate lifecycle vulnerability remediation and performance tuning. Administering SQL Server databases across on-prem instances and Amazon RDS including migrations performance tuning and backup and recovery. Defining AWS infrastructure as code in Terraform — writing modules managing state and building reusable patterns other teams can adopt. Building and maintaining deployment pipelines in GitHub Actions and AWS CodeBuild so that changes are reviewable repeatable and safe to ship. Fronting applications with AWS load balancing and web application firewall services — building target groups and health checks and writing WAF rules that protect the application without breaking it. Instrumenting the platform dashboards service level objectives and alerts that surface real degradation instead of noise and retiring the alerts that do not. Migrating and modernizing Windows applications as they move from on-prem infrastructure to AWS refactoring architecture where it makes sense along the way. Working closely with application owners and software engineers to identify requirements plan and implement projects — installing new custom applications with web services database components data hosting and load balancing. Automating routine operational work into self-service capabilities so application owners and developers can renew certificates rotate service account credentials and restart application services without opening a ticket. Monitoring application health and responding to alerts such as service down failed backup slow response time or full file systems. Documenting day-to-day administrative processes and configuration information for the applications we support. Occasionally presenting to your team or our software developer colleagues on DevOps and cloud practices new technologies and how you approached and solved challenging technical problems. After hours and weekend work may occasionally be required for pre-planned maintenance or for troubleshooting service-impacting outages. This is a remote position. However candidate must be local and/or able to come onsite once a week in Rockville MD Required

Skills

BA/BS or equivalent and six to eight years of related experience including a minimum of three years hands-on with AWS. Minimum of three years hands-on AWS experience across commonly used services — IAM EC2 S3 RDS Lambda Route 53 SSM and CloudTrail — including designing and operating production workloads. Demonstrated experience authoring Terraform from scratch — modules remote state and lifecycle management — not solely modifying existing configurations. Minimum of five years hands-on experience deploying configuring hardening and troubleshooting applications on Windows Server 2019 2022 or 2025 and IIS v8.5 and v10 including .NET 8 and .NET 9 workloads. Strong experience administering Microsoft SQL Server (2017 2019 2022 or 2025) and Amazon RDS for SQL Server including performance tuning backup and recovery and migration between the two. Experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or AWS CodeBuild with Git-based branching and pull request workflows as the default way of working. Strong scripting experience with PowerShell plus Python or Bash. Working knowledge of observability and site reliability practices — metrics logs traces service level objectives and alerting — using a platform such as Datadog CloudWatch or equivalent. Experience creating applying and troubleshooting TLS or SSL certificates for web servers such as IIS Tomcat Apache or nginx and managing certificates through AWS Certificate Manager. Experience analyzing solution components understanding systems integration challenges and identifying technology gaps that must be resolved to reach future performance and functionality targets. Able to clearly present ideas to both technical and non-technical users and staff to further the adoption of cloud and DevOps practices. Ability to obtain and maintain an NIH Public Trust security clearance. Desired

Skills

Experience with AWS edge and traffic services — Application and Network Load Balancers AWS WAF CloudFront and Route 53 routing policies. Experience migrating and modernizing Windows-based applications on AWS — moving IIS .NET and SQL Server workloads off legacy infrastructure and improving them once they land. Experience building the automation others depend on reusable Terraform modules pipeline tooling automated validation and drift detection and self-service capabilities that let application owners handle routine tasks independently. Experience breaking down monolithic applications into containers and running them on AWS ECS. Experience managing secrets and credential lifecycle using AWS Secrets Manager or Parameter Store including automated rotation of service accounts and certificates. Experience with fleet configuration and patch automation at scale using SSM State Manager and Patch Manager or PowerShell DSC. Familiarity with application-level resilience and availability patterns — health checks graceful degradation multi-AZ deployment and recovery testing. Experience with access and authentication technologies such as LDAP SAML or Kerberos. Current AWS certification — Solutions Architect SysOps Administrator or DevOps Engineer. Depth in Datadog or mature site reliability practice — service level objective design error budgets and incident response and postmortem process. Familiarity with AI and large language model workflows using Amazon Bedrock or Amazon Q / Amazon Quick and interest in applying them to operational and documentation work. Work

Requirements

Years of Experience 5 + years of related experience may vary based on technical training certification(s) or degree Certification Travel Required None Salary and Benefit Information The likely salary range for this position is $108800 - $147200. This is not however a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather salary will be set based on experience geographic location and possibly contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range. Our Identity Verification Process As part of the hiring process we will ask you to complete an identity verification process that leverages advanced biometrics and artificial intelligence to ensure authenticity and protect against identity fraud. You are expected to be on camera during virtual interviews. We reserve the right to take your picture to verify your identity and prevent fraud. By proceeding you authorize the collection processing and use of your biometric data for identity verification and security purposes. About Our Work We are GDIT. A global technology and professional services company that delivers technology solutions and mission services to every major agency across the U.S. government defense and intelligence community. Our 26000 experts extract the power of technology to create immediate value and deliver solutions at the edge of innovation. We operate across 50+ countries worldwide offering leading mission-ready capabilities in AI cloud cyber and software development. Join our Talent Community to stay up to date on our career opportunities and events at gdit.com/tc. Equal Opportunity Employer / Individuals with Disabilities / Protected Veterans