Sr AWS Cloud Platform Engineer (Must AKS/EKS) :: W2 :: Hybrid-IL

Senior AWS Cloud Platform Engineer

Location: Naperville, IL
Work Schedule: Hybrid – Monday & Friday Remote; Tuesday–Thursday Onsite

Job Overview

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior AWS Cloud Platform Engineer / Senior DevOps Engineer to design, deploy, automate, and operate cloud-native platforms at scale.

The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, EKS/AKS, GitOps, Argo CD, GitHub Actions, Terraform, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, cloud networking, and platform automation.

This role goes beyond traditional operations. We are looking for a platform-minded engineer who continuously identifies opportunities to automate processes, reduce operational effort, improve reliability, and optimize technology costs.

Key Responsibilities

Kubernetes & Container Platform Engineering

• Deploy, manage, and troubleshoot workloads across AWS EKS and Azure AKS.
• Design, maintain, and upgrade Kubernetes clusters throughout their lifecycle.
• Manage Kubernetes networking, ingress controllers, service meshes, pod communication, and traffic routing.
• Troubleshoot complex issues involving pods, nodes, networking, DNS, storage, and cluster scalability.
• Implement high-availability and disaster-recovery strategies for Kubernetes platforms.

GitOps & CI/CD

• Design and manage enterprise-scale GitOps workflows using Argo CD.
• Automate application deployments and environment promotion strategies.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
• Define and enforce Git branching, release management, and deployment practices.
• Improve deployment reliability, rollback capabilities, and release governance.

AWS Cloud Engineering

Hands-on experience with:

• Amazon EKS
• EC2
• Route 53
• IAM
• CloudFront/CDN
• Application Load Balancer (ALB) & Network Load Balancer (NLB)
• VPC & AWS Networking
• Security Groups & NACLs
• Secrets Manager
• ElastiCache / Redis
• S3
• CloudWatch
• RDS
• Auto Scaling & High Availability architectures

Responsibilities include:

• Designing secure, scalable, and highly available AWS architectures.
• Implementing disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.
• Optimizing cloud cost, performance, security, and reliability.
• Managing multi-account AWS environments.

Infrastructure as Code

• Build and maintain reusable Terraform modules.
• Provision infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code best practices.
• Maintain environment consistency and compliance through automation.
• Troubleshoot Terraform state, drift, and large-scale deployments.

Platform Automation & Engineering Excellence

• Identify manual processes that can be automated.
• Develop solutions for deployment, infrastructure, logging, monitoring, and incident-response automation.
• Build self-service engineering capabilities.
• Develop internal developer tooling to improve engineering productivity.
• Continuously evaluate opportunities to reduce operational effort and tooling costs.

Observability & Monitoring

• Design monitoring and alerting solutions using Datadog or similar platforms.
• Implement automated alert correlation and incident-reduction mechanisms.
• Create dashboards, SLOs, and observability standards.
• Drive proactive monitoring practices across production environments.

Disaster Recovery & Resiliency

• Design highly resilient cloud architectures.
• Lead recovery planning for major production outages.
• Develop recovery strategies for:
• AWS region failures
• Kubernetes cluster failures
• Account compromises
• Infrastructure loss events
• Implement recovery solutions using IaC, backups, replication, and automation.

Required Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, Cloud Engineering, or a related field.
• Expert-level Kubernetes administration experience.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS EKS and/or Azure AKS.
• Deep understanding of Argo CD and GitOps.
• Strong experience with GitHub Actions and CI/CD.
• Advanced knowledge of Git branching and release management.
• Strong AWS architecture and operational experience.
• Advanced Terraform / Infrastructure as Code skills.
• Strong Docker and containerization experience.
• Linux system administration experience.
• Strong cloud networking and security knowledge.
• Experience designing highly available and resilient cloud platforms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Azure / AKS experience.
• Service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd.
• Multi-cloud platform experience.
• Datadog or comparable observability platforms.
• Programming/scripting experience with Python, Go, Bash, or Shell.
• Previous Platform Engineering experience.
• Experience with automation and internal developer platforms.