AWS Cloud Engineer

***This is a Contract-to-Hire position and candidates MUST BE local to Columbia, MD

***This is a W2 position and C2C/OPT-EAD Candidates are not eligible to apply.

Role: AWS Cloud Engineer

W2 Contract-to-Hire: 12 Months

Location: Hybrid in Columbia, MD

• Must be comfortable working 2-3 days per month
• This role requires scheduled after-hours work (evenings and weekends) to support maintenance and upgrades. Weekend work would be roughly once per month in the mornings.

Pay Rate: $60/hour on W2 - All inclusive

Overview & Responsibilities:

We are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to join a key FEP Bridge team managing the infrastructure for a large-scale, multi-tenant claims processing application. In this role, you will manage, maintain, and optimize the team's core AWS infrastructure. You will be a key player in designing future cloud architecture, optimizing the current environment for cost and efficiency, and helping migrate the final on-premise systems to AWS.

You will…

• Manage and maintain the core AWS infrastructure, including creating and managing EC2 instances.
• Help design and implement future AWS cloud architecture.
• Support the migration of the remaining on-prem infrastructure to AWS.
• Analyze and optimize the current AWS environment to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
• Work with cross-functional teams to manage connectivity for third-party integrations, including REST APIs, SFTP, and Message Queues (MQ).
• Design infrastructure architecture solutions and work with network and firewall engineers to implement them.
• Participate in required after-hours and weekend maintenance activities (typically 1-2 evenings per week and 1-2 weekends per month).

Required Qualifications

• 5-7 years of total IT experience focused on infrastructure management.
• A minimum of 4 years of hands-on experience managing AWS environments.
• Strong hands-on experience with core AWS services: EC2, S3, and networking (VPC, DNS, static IPs, ALBs/NLBs, availability zones).
• Experience with infrastructure-level support for integrations: REST APIs (connectivity, not development), SFTP/File Transfer Protocol, and Message Queue (MQ) systems.
• Hands-on implementation and production-level experience in an AWS environment.
• Must be able to work the hybrid schedule and be required after-hours.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with IBM MQ.
• Experience with monitoring tools like Dynatrace, Datadog, or Nagios.
• Basic scripting skills in Linux or Windows.
• AWS Solutions Architect certification.
• Healthcare industry background.
• Hands-on experience with automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).