Senior Cloud Engineer
Steampunk · McLean, VA
$130,000–$180,000from the description
Jul 24, 2026
McLean, VA
Jul 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior-level cloud engineering role embedded in a DevSecOps practice, focused on designing, deploying, and optimizing cloud-based systems — primarily on AWS — for federal government clients. Day-to-day work spans infrastructure as code, configuration automation, security hardening, deployment pipelines, and mentoring junior engineers. Suits a seasoned AWS practitioner comfortable working across development teams in an Agile environment who can obtain a U.S. government security clearance.
Senior level · 8+ years · Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV · Bachelor's required · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 620 people in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 260–930
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
What the occupation pays Median $158,337 (middle half $126,441–$180,105). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The clearance requirement is listed as 'Public Trust' and 'Ability to obtain a U.S. government Security Clearance' — this is not a hard-gated active clearance (Secret or above), so the clearance requirement is set to None. Candidates should be aware they must be clearance-eligible.
The AWS certification requirement is unusual as a hard gate — the JD explicitly lists it under Required qualifications, so it is treated as a must-have.
The scripting languages (Bash, PowerShell, Python, Groovy, Ruby) and Concourse are listed under Preferred; Bash is used as the primary name with the others as alternatives since they are presented as interchangeable options.
Automation tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Chef, Pivotal) are listed under Preferred; Terraform is used as the primary name with the others as alternatives.
The 3+ years of experience in database architecture, ETL, BI, big data, ML, or advanced analytics is a required gate but names no specific technology — it is captured in the overall years minimum context only; no concrete tool was named to emit as a skill.
The role blends infrastructure/cloud engineering with software development (IaC, CI/CD, DevSecOps tooling); 15-1252 is chosen because the primary work involves designing, building, and deploying cloud systems and automation code rather than purely operating existing infrastructure.
Read the full posting
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