Windows Cloud DevOps Engineer - Onsite in Washington, DC

This position is 100% onsite in Washington, DC.

This is a 90 day contract-to-hire position.

MUST have a Bachelor's degree in a technical field, must have 10 years of IT experience, and must have 3 years cloud experience.

What You Will Do

• Own Windows Server production operations (day one). Serve as the senior technical owner for a predominantly Windows Server environment (~95% Windows), providing hands-on production support for mission-critical applications hosted in government cloud (AWS GovCloud).
• Administer and sustain Windows Server. Maintain, troubleshoot, patch, harden, and recover Windows Server systems in production — sustaining availability during business hours and through a shared on-call rotation, independently resolving after-hours incidents.
• Take ownership of Kubernetes. Independently operate and troubleshoot the Kubernetes environment (EKS), resolving complex cluster, workload, and platform issues and supporting existing production applications and workloads.
• Lead incident response. Drive production incident response and deep-dive root-cause analysis across Windows Server, cloud, and container platforms.
• Engineer secure cloud infrastructure. Design, implement, and maintain secure, scalable cloud architectures across Windows and Linux systems; work independently or lead small teams.
• Automate with IaC (secondary). Develop and manage Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and Ansible to provision and configure environments — secondary to Windows operations and Kubernetes troubleshooting.
• Build CI/CD and DevSecOps. Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines and DevSecOps automation aligned with government and industry best practices.
• Monitor and ensure availability. Design and implement monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions; establish performance baselines and ensure system availability.
• Harden federal environments. Enforce security best practices, including identity and access management and system hardening for federal environments.
• Document and mentor. Develop and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and SOPs; mentor junior and mid-level engineers and provide technical leadership across DevOps practices.

What You Will Need

• Windows Server operations — highest priority. Strong, current, hands-on Windows Server administration/engineering: production support, troubleshooting, maintenance, recovery, and patching. The environment is approximately 95% Windows.
• Current Kubernetes expertise. Able to independently operate, troubleshoot, and take ownership of a production Kubernetes environment and answer senior-level Kubernetes questions.
• Day-one senior contributor. Demonstrated ability to perform at a senior level immediately with minimal or no ramp-up; practical production operations experience rather than primarily cloud-native development.
• On-call readiness. Willing and able to participate in a production on-call rotation and independently resolve after-hours incidents.
• Experience. Minimum 10 years of relevant IT/engineering experience, including senior-level Windows Server operations and 3+ years supporting cloud engineering environments.
• Government cloud. Strong hands-on experience with AWS GovCloud.
• Education. Bachelor's degree (BA/BS) in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field; a Master's degree may substitute for additional years of experience per contract guidance.
• Core skills. Ability to work independently with minimal supervision in complex, secure environments; strong analytical and advanced troubleshooting skills; excellent written, verbal, and stakeholder communication; demonstrated technical leadership and mentoring.
• Clearance. Ability to obtain and maintain a Federal Public Trust (or higher); candidates with an active clearance strongly preferred.

What Will Be Nice to Have

• Windows automation & certs. PowerShell scripting; Microsoft / Windows Server Administrator certifications.
• IaC depth. Deep Terraform (Infrastructure as Code) and Ansible (configuration management/automation) expertise.
• Kubernetes at scale. Service mesh, API gateways, and Kubernetes security tooling.
• Federal compliance. Experience with FISMA, NIST, and FedRAMP frameworks.
• Cloud certifications. AWS Certified DevOps Engineer.
• Security adjacencies. Familiarity with PKI, identity services, or credential management systems.
• Enterprise scale & scripting. Experience supporting large-scale, multi-environment enterprise systems; scripting in Python and Bash.