Senior DevOps Engineer (AWS/Windows)

GDIT is seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer (AWS / Windows) to join our National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) team in Rockville, MD. You will use Terraform to create, modify, and automate the AWS infrastructure that hosts NIAID's Windows-based scientific and business applications.

Our ideal candidate is a senior engineer who manages infrastructure through code. You have built and maintained AWS environments in Terraform, delivered changes through Git-based pipelines, and automated the manual work that usually comes with hosting Windows applications. You are as comfortable writing a Terraform module as you are troubleshooting an application running on IIS.

As a senior member of our Cloud DevOps team, you will run and improve our existing AWS platform and help move the remaining on-prem Windows workloads into AWS. You will work closely with application owners, software developers, and security teams, own your work from design through operations, and help shape how the team builds and ships infrastructure. After-hours work is occasionally required for planned maintenance or for troubleshooting service-impacting outages.

HOW A SENIOR DEVOPS ENGINEER WILL MAKE AN IMPACT:

• Create, modify, and maintain AWS infrastructure and services in Terraform. That means writing new modules and configurations, extending existing ones, and managing state across environments.

• Deliver infrastructure changes through GitHub Actions and AWS CodeBuild pipelines, so every change is reviewed in a pull request, planned, and applied the same way every time.

• Build and maintain the AWS environment that hosts Windows Server and IIS applications running .NET, including EC2, load balancers, AWS WAF, Route 53, IAM, and TLS certificates, all defined in Terraform.

• Migrate on-prem Windows applications into AWS and improve them once they land, including moving applications into containers on Amazon ECS where it makes sense.

• Automate routine operational work such as certificate renewal, service account credential rotation, patching, and service restarts, using Terraform, PowerShell, and AWS Systems Manager. Where possible, turn these tasks into self-service options for application owners.
• Troubleshoot problems across the application and infrastructure layers (IIS, .NET, networking, and AWS services) and fix the root cause in code rather than by hand.

• Build and tune monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch and native AWS observability services, including metrics, logs, alarms, dashboards, and the CloudWatch agent on Windows servers, all defined in Terraform. Set service level objectives and alerts so the team hears about real problems before users do.

• Work with the security team to remediate vulnerabilities and apply hardening standards to Windows servers and AWS resources.

• Review teammates' Terraform and pipeline changes, share what works, and help shape the team's standards for infrastructure as code and deployments.

Required Experience:

• BA/BS and 7+ years of related IT experience, or equivalent experience. This must include 3+ years of hands-on DevOps or cloud engineering in AWS supporting production workloads.

• 3+ years using Terraform to create, modify, and automate AWS infrastructure, including writing modules, safely changing existing configurations, and managing remote state.

• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines that deploy infrastructure changes, using GitHub Actions, AWS CodeBuild, or similar tools, with Git branching and pull request workflows.

• Hands-on experience with core AWS services, including EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, Elastic Load Balancing, Route 53, and Systems Manager.

• Experience implementing monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch, including metrics, logs, alarms, and dashboards, and collecting Windows and IIS logs and metrics with the CloudWatch agent.

• 3+ years supporting Windows Server and IIS environments that host .NET applications, including deployment, configuration, TLS certificates, and troubleshooting.

• Strong PowerShell scripting skills, plus working knowledge of Python or Bash.

• Ability to work independently on complex problems and to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Must be able to obtain and maintain an NIH Public Trust.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience migrating Windows and .NET applications from on-prem infrastructure to AWS.

• Experience containerizing applications and running them on Amazon ECS.

• Experience with Application and Network Load Balancers, AWS WAF, CloudFront, and Route 53 routing policies.

• Experience with AWS Secrets Manager or Parameter Store and AWS Certificate Manager, including automated rotation of credentials and certificates.

• Patch and configuration automation using SSM Patch Manager and State Manager, or PowerShell DSC.

• Datadog experience, including dashboards, SLO design, and alert tuning.

• Experience with additional AWS observability services, such as CloudTrail, EventBridge, AWS X-Ray, or CloudWatch Synthetics.

• Familiarity with Amazon RDS for SQL Server from the hosting side, such as connectivity, backups, and migrations.

• HashiCorp Terraform Associate, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, or AWS Solutions Architect certification.