Lead AWS Cloud

Job Title: Lead Technologist, Cloud Engineering/ Lead AWS Cloud & DevOps Engineer Employment Type: Full-Time – Direct Hire

Location:
New York City, NY (Hybrid)

Salary:
W2 $160k
- $ 190k, including benefits

Experience:
10+ Years Position Our Direct client, a leading financial services firm, is seeking a Lead Technologist, Cloud Engineering to manage its AWS cloud environment. This individual will work closely with business and technology stakeholders to design and implement DevOps and platform engineering best practices. This role is critical to enabling a standardized, secure, scalable, resilient, and efficient application and infrastructure footprint within the cloud environment. The Lead Technologist will collaborate across IT and business teams throughout the full system development lifecycle, including requirements gathering, application design, coding, testing, delivery, support, and enhancements. Primary Responsibilities The successful candidate will have extensive technical experience working with AWS cloud technologies, preferably within financial services organizations such as asset managers, hedge funds, or broker-dealers. The candidate must lead by example and work collaboratively to: Architect and manage cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure, prioritizing security, stability, and cost efficiency. Design and oversee CI/CD pipelines and automation strategies. Establish infrastructure-as-code practices using AWS CDK, GitLab, and AWS developer tools. Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to ensure platform stability. Evaluate cloud technologies and establish best practices based on business and technical requirements. Ensure application architectures follow cloud best practices for reliability, security, performance, and efficiency. Develop and enforce standards for system security, compliance, and disaster recovery. Optimize infrastructure costs while maintaining performance standards. Develop reference implementations and contribute through hands-on coding as needed. Partner with development teams to improve deployment processes and system reliability. Translate business requirements into technical solutions while promoting technology consistency and best practices. Collaborate with engineers, business users, and stakeholders to align solutions with business goals. Maintain documentation for reference architectures, design patterns, and system configurations. Improve development capabilities, standards, and processes. Gather requirements across IT and business teams and recommend creative, scalable solutions. Work within Agile/Scrum alongside end users, business analysts, architects, and developers. Recommend standardization of technology selection, deployment procedures, code reviews, and IT tools. Partner with development, QA, and AppSecOps teams to strengthen consistency, standardization, and security posture. Technology Environment Applications are primarily developed using Python/Django and libraries such as Pandas, NumPy, and PL/SQL. The environment also includes SQL Server, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, Kafka, Tableau, and various third-party APIs and data sources. Applications are hosted in AWS using Docker containers across ECS, Fargate, and EC2 platforms. Desired Background 10+ years of hands-on experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or platform engineering roles. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related discipline; strong relevant experience and other educational backgrounds will also be considered. Strong experience with AWS cloud technologies. Knowledge of CI/CD pipeline tools such as GitLab Pipelines and Jenkins. Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools such as ELK, Dynatrace, and Datadog. Experience with microservices, serverless architectures, and containerization. Proficiency in AWS cloud services, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD pipeline implementation. Formal problem-solving or analytical training and experience working with management consultants are a plus. Strong intuition for end-user requirements gathering and an iterative, collaborative approach to solution design. Excellent relationship management, written and verbal communication skills across organizational levels. Initial Success Criteria The successful candidate will balance immediate tactical needs with longer-term strategic initiatives supporting business teams. Within the first six months, the candidate is expected to: Lead efforts to improve cloud infrastructure reliability and observability. Play a key role in an ongoing CI/CD pipeline migration initiative. Make hands-on contributions to delivery of the project portfolio. Build strong relationships with key stakeholders and understand the organization’s products, services, and business processes. Contribute to broader IT strategy discussions to evolve cloud architecture, systems architecture, and technology choices for business users and decision-makers.