Cloud Engineer at Steampunk
McLean, VA
$100,000–$175,000from the description
Jul 23, 2026
McLean, VA
Jul 26, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A mid-to-senior cloud engineering role within a federal contracting DevSecOps practice, focused on designing, deploying, and optimizing cloud infrastructure — primarily on AWS — using infrastructure-as-code, configuration automation, and CI/CD tooling. The position involves resolving infrastructure vulnerabilities, supporting large-scale deployments, and mentoring junior engineers. A security clearance eligibility and an AWS certification are required.
Senior level · 5+ years · Bachelor's required · Secret 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
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 (10)
The role is titled 'Cloud Engineer' with no seniority modifier, but the 5+ year requirements across multiple domains and the expectation to mentor junior team members support a Senior classification.
The clearance requirement is 'ability to obtain' a U.S. government Security Clearance — no specific level (Secret, TS, etc.) is named. Mapped to Secret as the baseline for federal contractor roles of this type; the actual level may differ by contract.
The degree requirement states a BS in an IT field OR a BS in a non-IT field plus 2 years of related IT experience — a bachelor's degree is always required, so the degree requirement is set to Bachelors.
The AWS certification requirement lists multiple acceptable levels (Cloud Practitioner, Associate, Professional, or Specialty); any one of these satisfies the gate.
Scripting languages (Bash, PowerShell, Python, Groovy, Ruby) are listed under Preferred. Bash is used as the primary name with the others as alternatives since the posting treats them as interchangeable options.
Automation tools (Terraform, Chef, CloudFormation, Ansible, Pivotal) are listed under Preferred and treated as interchangeable alternatives.
The 'Infrastructure as Code' skill captures the required 5+ years of IaC/orchestration experience; specific tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Chef) appear only under Preferred.
No work location or metro area is specified in the posting; the company serves federal clients and is likely DC-area based, but no city is stated.
The alt SOC 15-1244 is noted because the role has a meaningful infrastructure operations and configuration management dimension, though the emphasis on designing, developing, and deploying cloud solutions tips it toward 15-1252.
Requires a Secret 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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