Cloud Administrator – AI/ML TS/SCI w Poly at Peraton
Laurel, MD
$104,000–$166,000from the description
Jun 29, 2026
Laurel, MD
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role involves administering and maintaining large-scale Hadoop clusters and AWS cloud infrastructure in support of national security cyber and AI/ML programs. Day-to-day work centers on troubleshooting distributed systems, managing Linux environments, writing automation scripts, and supporting configuration management — with additional exposure to LLM and machine learning workloads. It suits candidates with hands-on Linux and distributed-systems experience who hold an active TS/SCI clearance with polygraph.
Senior level · 3+ years · Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV · TS/SCI clearance · 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
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $128,188 (middle half $100,819–$156,589). 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 (10)
The role title is 'Cloud Administrator' and the primary day-to-day work centers on operating, maintaining, and troubleshooting large-scale Hadoop/cloud clusters (>1000 nodes), Linux systems administration, and configuration management — pointing to 15-1244. However, the role also requires 3 years of scripting experience and involves AWS architecture and AI/ML infrastructure, which has some overlap with 15-1252 Software Developers; 15-1244 was chosen as the primary fit.
An active TS/SCI clearance WITH polygraph is explicitly required as a hard gate.
The stated minimum experience requirement is 3 years at the role level, but the role also demands 5 years of Linux OS experience and 1 year of Hadoop cluster management — the 3-year figure appears in the formal Qualifications section as the overall minimum.
A Bachelor's degree is listed but the JD explicitly accepts 1 additional year of experience in lieu of a degree, so the degree requirement is set to None.
LLMs, Agentic AI, and RAG appear under 'Competencies and Skills' narrative framing rather than a hard-requirements gate, and are listed alongside desired qualifications context — treated as preferred.
Kubernetes, Docker, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Grafana, HAProxy/nginx, and SSH tunneling skills all appear under 'Additional Desired Qualifications' and are treated as preferred.
The Puppet/SALT requirement lists both tools as a pair under the hard-requirements section; SALT is captured as an alternative since either satisfies the configuration management requirement.
Accumulo, Cassandra, SCALITY, and SWIFT are listed as interchangeable distributed storage/database options in the requirements section; Accumulo is used as the primary with the others as alternatives.
openSSL and Java keystore manipulation appear in the main requirements body and are treated as required; Java keystore is a sub-feature of openSSL/PKI work and is not emitted as a separate skill.
Requires a TS/SCI clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Read the full posting
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