Cloud Hosting Subject Matter Expert (SME)

Cloud Hosting Subject Matter Expert (SME)

The Cloud Hosting SME is the technical lead for designing, building, and operating secure, reliable, and cost-effective hybrid/multi-cloud platforms for mission systems. You will own the enterprise design patterns, landing zones, identity and network baselines, observability, automation, and disaster recovery that let teams deploy quickly and safely across AWS, Azure, and on-prem environments. You’ll partner with the engineering and delivery teams on a clear service catalog, and with finance on unit economics and optimization, while leading the product life cycle for hosting platforms that meet federal standards (NIST, RMF, TIC 3.0, Zero Trust) and ATO sustainment.

Timeline: This is a contingent posting, expected to start in August, 2026

HOW the Cloud Hosting SME WILL MAKE AN IMPACT

You will turn current hosting platforms from a collection of projects into a standardized, auditable platform that accelerates delivery and reduces risk. By codifying landing zones and guardrails as reusable templates, you’ll cut environment build times from weeks to minutes and prevent configuration drift. Your identity-centric designs and policy-as-code controls will raise security without slowing teams down, while SRE practices and progressive delivery will reduce incidents and shorten time to restore. You’ll right-size capacity, apply commitments effectively, and tier storage so cost per unit trends down even as usage grows. The result is visible to executives and end users alike: faster launches, higher availability, cleaner audits, and predictable spend.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO SUCCEED:

• Education: Bachelor's Degree. In lieu of a degree, an additional four years of related experience required
• Experience:
  • 10+ years in cloud/platform engineering or cloud architecture with hands-on delivery at enterprise scale; at least 3 years leading hybrid/multi-cloud (AWS/Azure) in regulated or federal environments.
  • Demonstrated ownership of secure landing zones, network/identity patterns, and CI/CD/IaC pipelines; track record reducing MTTR, change failure rate, and cost per unit.
  • Experience aligning to NIST SP 800-53/RMF, Zero Trust/TIC 3.0, FedRAMP services, and ATO sustainment, evidence of successful audits or compliance assessments.
  • Proven delivery of container platforms (Kubernetes/OpenShift) and platform services (databases, messaging, caches) with DR/RTO/RPO objectives.
  • Leadership in multi-vendor/SIAM settings with shared KPIs, cross-domain change coordination, and incident “swarming��.
• Technical skills:
  • Cloud Platforms: Deep expertise in AWS and Azure (GCP, OCI a plus): Organizations/Entra ID/IAM, Control Tower/Landing Zone, Transit Gateway/vWAN, PrivateLink/Private Endpoints, Key Management, security and monitoring services.
  • Networking & Identity: VPC/VNet design, hub-and-spoke, SD-WAN integration, DNS, NAT, firewalling, service mesh, SSO (SAML/OIDC), PIV/FIDO2, JIT/PIM/PAM.
  • Automation & Delivery: Terraform, CloudFormation/Bicep, Ansible, Packer, Helm; GitOps (Argo CD/Flux); policy-as-code (OPA/Conftest/Cloud Custodian); progressive delivery (blue/green, canary).
  • Containers & Platform Engineering: Kubernetes/OpenShift operations, cluster lifecycle, admission control, image signing/provenance, supply-chain security (SBOM, attestations).
  • Observability & SRE: OpenTelemetry (traces/metrics/logs), Prometheus/Grafana, log analytics/SIEM; SLOs/error budgets; synthetic and RUM monitoring.
  • Data & Storage: Managed databases (e.g., RDS/Aurora, SQL MI, Cosmos/Spanner), backup/restore with immutability/object lock, cross-region replication, tiering and lifecycle management.
  • Security & Compliance: Baseline hardening (CIS/STIGs), vulnerability/patch orchestration, encryption in transit/at rest, secrets management (Vault/KMS), least-privilege patterns; evidence generation for RMF ConMon.
  • Cost & Performance: FinOps fundamentals - commitment management (RIs/SPs/CCAs/Committed Use), autoscaling/scale-to-zero, right-sizing, storage tiering; performance tuning at app/network/data layers.
• Security clearance level: Public Trust
• Skills and abilities:
  • Clear Communication: Converts complex architecture into simple narratives and diagrams for executives, engineers, and non-technical stakeholders; writes crisp runbooks and design docs.
  • Outcome Focus: Designs to measurable targets (availability, MTTR, time-to-provision, control pass rate, cost per unit) and publishes trends transparently.
  • Collaboration & Leadership: Guides cross-functional teams (security, networking, databases, app teams, vendors); mentors engineers; facilitate decisions and resolves blockers quickly.
  • Customer Orientation: Partners with stakeholders to make cloud services easy to request and adopt; builds self-service with safe defaults to reduce tickets and cycle time.
  • Discipline & Execution: Coordinates release trains and maintenance windows; enforces change control with automation first; drives continuous improvement backlogs to closure.
  • Adaptability: Stays current on emerging tech and pilots what measurably improves reliability, security, or cost.
• Preferred Certifications:
  • AWS Solutions Architect – Professional
  • Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert
  • VMware Certified Professional / Advanced Professional
  • CKA/CKAD or OpenShift Administrator
  • HashiCorp Terraform Associate / Authoring and Operations Professional
• Location: Austin, TX – Hybrid Remote with periodic on-site meetings as required by the customer

GDIT IS YOUR PLACE:

• Full-flex work week to own your priorities at work and at home
• 401K with company match
• Comprehensive health and wellness packages
• Internal mobility team dedicated to helping you build your skills and own your career
• Professional growth opportunities including paid education and certifications
• Cutting-edge technology you can learn from
• Rest and recharge with paid vacation and 10 company-paid holidays

If you’re excited to build secure, reliable, and cost-effective cloud hosting platforms that make a real difference for VA’s mission, and you thrive on turning best practices into everyday practice, we’d like to meet you.