AWS/EKS Platform Engineer

Job Title: AWS/EKS Platform Engineer Location: Reston, VA (Hybrid — 1 day/week onsite; only local candidates will be considered) Company Overview Our client is a leading enterprise healthcare organization undertaking a major cloud transformation and platform modernization initiative. Project Description We are seeking an AWS Platform Engineer for a long-term contract position supporting our client in the Reston, VA area (candidates based in DC, MD, or VA preferred). This role covers the full service lifecycle — inception, design, deployment, and operations — with a strong focus on cloud-native automation, EKS provisioning, and enterprise cloud transformation. Key Responsibilities Communicate architectural decisions, plans, and strategies, balancing short-term trade-offs with long-term commitments Engage in and improve the end-to-end lifecycle of services, from inception and design through deployment and operations Establish automation capabilities leveraging cloud-native solutions to improve the developer experience Support system design consulting, platform/framework development, capacity planning, and launch reviews Troubleshoot difficult issues and engage directly with the customer Drive systems scalability and sustainability through automation and reliability improvements Lead enterprise cloud transformation and migration efforts Guide customers on cloud-native design and architecture patterns Provide consultation on technology infrastructure planning and engineering Establish strategies to migrate legacy applications into microservices hosted on AWS Leverage containers, immutable infrastructure, microservices, and service mesh to build highly available, fault-tolerant applications Research global technology trends and their applicability to internal development teams and business initiatives Promote modern application design and engineering best practices across the development and operations lifecycle Monitor and manage stability, availability, and performance across enterprise systems and platforms (systems, network, storage, security) Automate end-to-end processes for patching and upgrading the AWS cloud ecosystem Make data-driven recommendations to improve software delivery efficiency Mentor peers and collaborate across teams to socialize solutions Mandatory Skills Minimum of one AWS certification required 10+ years of IT experience, including at least 5 years in AWS Cloud, with SME-level knowledge of provisioning via automation using EKS AI experience required Strong leadership experience driving transformation initiatives Experience with SRE principles and transformation 3+ years with Kubernetes, cloud technologies (AWS, Azure), DevOps toolchain (Ansible, Jenkins, Artifactory, Bitbucket), and IaC/CI/CD patterns Solid understanding of software engineering (build, integration, test, release, deployment) using Python Experience developing and challenging engineering solutions in collaboration with peers, architects, and customers Hands-on experience building robust middleware environments; Linux system administration required Strong hands-on knowledge of AWS services including VPC, Networking, Direct Connect, Subnets, NACLs, Security Groups, EC2, S3, IAM, ELBs, Lambda, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and EKS Current, hands-on production-level experience in AWS Cloud Hands-on experience with automation and Infrastructure Provisioning (Infrastructure as Code / Policy as Code) Familiarity with Terraform automation, Ansible playbooks, and Python Experience with AWS CloudFormation and CDK required Hands-on experience writing Lambda functions, preferably in Python (Boto3) Strong Linux Bash scripting skills Solid understanding of DevOps toolchains, including Git/repo, Crucible, and Jenkins Solid understanding and experience with CI/CD toolchains Nice-to-Have Skills Hands-on experience with containerization and Amazon EKS