Senior Cloud Engineer

📋 Description

• • Architect the AWS backbone that keeps communities safe. As Senior Cloud Engineer you will own the design, deployment, and day-two operations of the entire AWS estate that powers BLTN—our AI-driven law-enforcement intelligence platform used from Boston to Seattle. Every line of Terraform you write, every alarm you tune, and every dollar you save directly translates into faster case resolution and safer neighborhoods.
• • Build a world-class cloud foundation. In your first 90 days you will codify our existing AWS footprint into version-controlled Terraform modules, establish multi-environment CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions → Terraform Cloud), and deliver a repeatable, auditable process that lets any engineer ship infrastructure changes in <15 minutes with zero downtime.
• • Optimize and control cloud spend. You will dive deep into Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, and AWS Compute Optimizer to identify waste, right-size workloads, and implement Reserved Instances and Savings Plans that cut baseline spend by at least 20 % while maintaining five-nines availability. You will institute mandatory cost-allocation tags, create monthly FinOps dashboards for leadership, and set budget alerts that prevent surprise bills.
• • Strengthen security and compliance posture. Working side-by-side with our CISO, you will conduct IAM policy reviews, enforce least-privilege roles, and deploy GuardDuty, Security Hub, and Macie across all accounts. You will map every control to CJIS, SOC 2 Type II, and NIST 800-53 requirements and produce evidence packages that streamline audits and customer security questionnaires.
• • Future-proof performance and scalability. You will enhance observability by instrumenting OpenTelemetry traces, CloudWatch metrics, and Datadog RUM so that any latency regression is caught before a detective in the field feels it. You will design blue/green and canary strategies for ECS services, Aurora zero-downtime major version upgrades, and OpenSearch shard rebalancing that keeps search queries sub-second even as data volume 10×.
• • Champion developer productivity. You will create self-service tooling (cookiecutter templates, pre-commit hooks, automated test environments) that lets backend engineers spin up feature branches in isolated AWS accounts within minutes. You will embed SLOs and error budgets into our culture, run weekly game-days, and mentor junior engineers on cloud best practices.
• • Own incident response and reliability. You will join a follow-the-sun on-call rotation, refine runbooks, and lead post-mortems that focus on systemic fixes, not blame. Your dashboards will become the single pane of glass that executives, support, and customers trust during critical incidents.
• • Collaborate across the mission. You will work daily with the CTO on architectural vision, the COO on cost governance, and the Backend Lead on service-level objectives. Your voice in sprint planning will influence product decisions, and your demos to law-enforcement stakeholders will show how infrastructure excellence translates into lives protected.