Cloud Application Engineer

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.