Senior Cloud Engineer / Contract

Senior Cloud Engineer / DevOps Engineer
An established fintech institution is seeking a Senior Cloud Engineer/DevOps Engineer to help create actionable intelligence to help organizations fight fraud, manage risk, remain compliant and better serve their customers. This 6-month contract position with possibility for hire is hybrid, with 3 days in-office in Downtown Chicago and 2 days remote.
As a critical member of the cloud engineering team, the Senior Cloud Engineer is responsible for architecting, deploying, and optimizing scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud solutions. Working in partnership with cross-functional stakeholders and engineering teams, this role drives the successful migration of mission-critical applications and data from on-premises platforms to AWS, enabling the organization's cloud-first strategy.
Contract Duration: 6-month contract with possibility for hire
Required Skills & Experience

• 7+ years of experience within Cloud Engineering, DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering
• Command of AWS core services such as EC2, EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, IAM with up-to-date certifications, specifically in a Terraform landscape
• Advanced proficiency working in Docker
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes
• Knowledge of implementing security & compliance controls within frameworks such as PCI-DSS, SOC 2, or FFIEC
• Demonstrated expertise in modern engineering and DevOps practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, secure coding, and software development frameworks such as Scrum, LEAN, and Agile
• Experience designing and implementing scalable observability solutions for complex, high-volume transactional systems
• Strong track record of exceptional customer focus, documentation and communication skills, attention to detail, and the ability to effectively prioritize tasks and navigate ambiguous situations
• Subject to background check and drug testing

Desired Skills & Experience

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, or similar discipline
• Working knowledge of or experience within financial institutions and other highly regulated industries
• Proficient in additional programming languages, including C#, Ruby, and Python
• Strong understanding of ACH/EFT processing and real-time payment networks such as RTP and FedNow
• Familiarity with monitoring and alerting systems such as AppDynamics
• Familiarity with container security solutions such as Twistlock or Aqua Security

What You Will Be Doing
Tech Breakdown

• 60% Building Kubernetes clusters from scratch
• 20% Terraform
• 20% CI/CD Pipelines

Daily Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and optimize AWS cloud-native solutions (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, EKS) with a focus on scalability and cost efficiency
• Build secure, compliant cloud infrastructure aligned with regulatory and risk requirements
• Troubleshoot complex infrastructure issues, perform root cause analysis, and participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation
• Partner with Security and Compliance teams to meet PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and FFIEC requirements and support audit activities
• Develop disaster recovery solutions to ensure high availability, resilience, and rapid recovery
• Implement cloud security best practices, including IAM, VPC architecture, encryption, and AWS KMS
• Automate infrastructure using Terraform and CI/CD pipelines to improve consistency and efficiency
• Support vulnerability management, patching, and configuration compliance to meet SLAs
• Maintain clear technical documentation for cloud architecture, standards, and operational procedures
• Enhance observability through monitoring, logging, and alerting tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, and Splunk
• Provide technical leadership in planning, designing, and delivering cloud solutions to production
• Protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems and data while supporting enterprise risk management