Senior Cloud Engineer
Illumination Works LLC
- Location
- Remote (US)
- Employment
- Full-time
- Level
- Senior Level
About the Role
Illumination Works LLC is seeking a Senior Cloud Engineer to design, build, and maintain serverless workloads on AWS. This role is for an action-oriented professional who can independently execute technical solutions and provide architectural guidance.
Skills
Benefits
- Medical Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Life Insurance
- 401K
- PTO
- Disability Insurance
Perks
- Remote Work
- Training Opportunities
Full job details
Location: Remote
We are seeking a Senior Cloud Engineer to design, build, and maintain serverless workloads on AWS that power a distributed, event-driven platform. This role demands an action-oriented professional who can quickly absorb and independently execute technical solutions while providing architectural guidance and contributing to the overall system design.
Roles and Responsibilities:
- Design and implement serverless workloads on AWS using Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, SQS, SNS, Step Functions, DynamoDB, and S3.
- Author and maintain CloudFormation (YAML) templates as the source of truth for infrastructure, including nested stacks, change sets, and drift detection.
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that lint, test, package, and deploy CloudFormation stacks and code across environments with defined promotion and rollback strategies.
- Develop Python based Lambda functions, internal tooling, and automation with appropriate testing, logging, error handling, and dependency management.
- Provide architecture guidance for distributed event-driven systems, including choreography vs. orchestration, idempotency, delivery semantics, dead-letter and replay strategies, and schema evolution.
- Define event contracts and async integration patterns in partnership with application teams.
- Implement observability across services: structured logging, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), metrics, and actionable alarms.
- Participate in incident response and post-incident reviews and convert findings into automated guardrails and runbooks.
- Conduct code and design reviews; mentor junior and mid-level engineers on serverless patterns, IaC standards, and operational practices.
Do you have what it takes? Are you driven to implement creative solutions that unravel complex and ever-changing challenges? We value passion, curiosity, and perseverance with an ability to communicate ideas and results to diverse audiences. We look for people who thrive in collaborative and independent assignments, have the aptitude to learn new data quickly, and who are willing to mentor junior team members.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 4+ years of professional cloud or software engineering experience, with 2+ years building production AWS serverless workloads.
- Strong Python proficiency, including pytest, packaging, and async patterns.
- Hands-on CloudFormation experience leveraging Stacks and StackSets.
- Demonstrated experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines that deploy infrastructure, application code, and provision managed services.
- Working knowledge of event-driven architecture patterns and the trade-offs between EventBridge, SNS, SQS, and Kinesis.
- Practical understanding of AWS IAM, VPC networking, KMS, and least-privilege design for serverless workloads.
- Experience producing design documentation and driving technical decisions from ambiguous requirements.
- Light web application development experience sufficient to build internal tools, admin UIs, or thin frontends that integrate with serverless APIs.
- Must hold an active security clearance
- CompTIA Security+ certification
- Acceptable candidates must successfully pass a drug test and background screen
Preferred Skills:
- AWS GovCloud experience and familiarity with FedRAMP, DoD IL4/IL5, or other regulated environments.
- Experience designing and deploying agentic AI workloads on Amazon Bedrock, including Bedrock Agents, Knowledge Bases, and tool/function calling integrated with serverless backends (Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge).
- Strong background in secure authentication and authorization design with a least-privilege mindset, including PKI and mTLS, AWS IAM roles and policies, OAuth 2.0 flows, OIDC, JWT validation, and federated identity patterns (SAML, IAM Identity Center).
- Performance and cost tuning for high throughput serverless workloads
- Additional certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate or Professional) or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer.
- Experience contributing to internal developer platforms or shared tooling.
About ILW
At Illumination Works, we know data, and we should, we’ve been doing it since we started in 2006! We specialize in everything data from big data to data science, data engineering, software engineering, and cloud design. We are a trusted technology partner in user-centered digital transformation—delivering impactful business results to clients. We partner with customers to solve their unique technology and data challenges and stay on top of modern technologies and advancements leveraging our Innovation Lab. Check out our website to learn more at www.ilwllc.com.
Why choose us? We invest in our employees in all aspects of their life and we value family. We offer market-competitive salary, a generous PTO package, and comprehensive medical, dental, vision and life insurance plans. We also offer 401K, short/long-term disability insurance, a fun and engaging culture, and training opportunities to keep you up to speed on the latest technologies.
Commitment to Non-Discrimination
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, local, or international law.
E-Verify Participation Poster (uscis.gov)
Accommodations
If you are an individual with a disability and would like to request a reasonable workplace accommodation for any part of our employment process, please contact the Human Resources Staff by sending an email to [email protected]. This option is reserved only for individuals who are requesting a reasonable workplace accommodation. It is not intended for other purposes or inquiries.
Notification for current or previously cleared professionals:
Official U.S. Government information appearing in the public domain shall not automatically be considered UNCLASSIFIED or approved for public release. ILW recognizes that information contained in resumes of current or previously cleared professionals may be sensitive, containing potentially proprietary and/or protected information. Protected Information is considered classified, in the process of a classification determination, or unclassified, but protected by statute. Therefore, all resumes should be approved for public release by a U.S. Government Official with Original Classification Authority, prior to posting the resume to ILW’s applicant tracking system.
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