Senior Cloud Engineer at Peraton
Washington, DC
$135,000–$216,000from the description
Jul 21, 2026
Washington, DC
Jul 23, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A cleared cloud engineering role supporting a U.S. Department of Energy program, focused on designing, deploying, and securing cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP. Day-to-day work spans infrastructure automation via IaC tools, CI/CD pipeline management, container orchestration, and federal compliance activities including ATO support and NIST 800-53 controls. Suits experienced cloud engineers holding an active DOE or Top Secret clearance.
Senior level · 12+ years · TS/SCI clearance · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
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 $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). 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 (9)
The clearance gate is stated as an active DOE Q, DOE L, Top Secret, or TS/SCI clearance. TS/SCI is the highest named level and is used here; the DOE Q clearance is roughly equivalent to Top Secret.
The degree requirement is effectively None: the JD accepts 12 years of experience with a Bachelor's degree OR 16 years with a high school diploma, meaning no specific degree is hard-gated.
The role sits between 15-1252 (Software Developers) and 15-1244 (Network/Systems Admins) — it writes IaC and automation code (pointing to 15-1252) but also heavily operates and secures cloud infrastructure (pointing to 15-1244). 15-1252 is chosen as primary because IaC authoring, CI/CD pipeline development, and automation scripting constitute the majority of the described day-to-day work.
The 12-year minimum applies to the path with a Bachelor's degree; the alternative path requires 16 years with a high school diploma. The lower threshold (12) is used for the overall years minimum.
Certifications (AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, CKA, Security+, CISSP, CCSP) are listed under 'One or More Preferred' and are not extracted as hard-gate skills.
CloudFormation and ARM/Bicep are listed as alternatives to Terraform since the JD frames them as interchangeable IaC options ('such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and/or Azure Resource Manager'). Similarly, Azure and GCP are alternatives to AWS.
Security Groups and NSGs are cloud-native constructs of AWS and Azure respectively rather than standalone named tools; they are captured under IAM and networking context rather than as separate skill entries.
Zero Trust Architecture experience appears under Preferred Qualifications and is a methodology rather than a named tool, so it is omitted per the generic-concept rule.
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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