Senior Engineer – AWS at thinkahead

<div>We are seeking a versatile Tier/3 AWS Engineer to join our Partner-Led Enterprise Support team. You will act as the primary technical escalation point for a broad range of AWS customers, handling high-severity incidents, complex architectural reviews, and proactive optimization across the full AWS service portfolio. This role requires deep, practical expertise in multiple AWS domains and the ability to deliver rapid, high-quality outcomes under pressure. As a Senior Cloud Engineer, you will utilize your extensive knowledge and experience to design, develop and deploy solutions for an array of technologies. You will work with a collaborative team leading, mentoring and ensuring development efforts are well documented and delivered with quality. A Senior Cloud Engineer is a highly experienced field professional, who combines a breadth of knowledge across open-source, enterprise and cloud technologies with a proven track record of delivery. They are expected to lead engagements and exhibit a high degree of commercial awareness along with mature communication skills. The Senior Cloud Engineer is highly experienced in designing, developing, and deploying integration solutions with external third-party tools. You will work with customer service owners, process owners and various service delivery groups and participate in customer engagements, demonstrations, and meetings in a professional and courteous manner. There is an expectation of some travel and after-hours/weekend support in the event of major outages/issues, or when requested by the client for change windows (or similar events).</div> Key Responsibilities Incident & Problem Management Lead triage, diagnosis, and resolution of critical (P1/P2) incidents across the AWS ecosystem. Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and deliver customer-facing post-mortem reports with actionable prevention plans. Coordinate with Technical Account Managers (TAMs), Service Teams, and customer stakeholders during live outages, Demos and meetings. Advanced Troubleshooting (Broad AWS Coverage) Compute: EC2 (AMI baking, Spot, Graviton), Lambda (concurrency, VPC), ECS/EKS (Fargate, Karpenter), Batch, Outposts. Storage: S3 (lifecycle, replication, Event Notifications), EBS (io2 Block Express, snapshots), EFS, FSx (ONTAP, Lustre), Storage Gateway, Backup. Database: RDS (Aurora, Multi-AZ, read replicas), DynamoDB (GSI, DAX, Streams), DocumentDB, Neptune, ElastiCache (Redis/Memcached). Networking & Content Delivery: VPC (peering, TGW, Network Firewall), Direct Connect, Site-to-Site VPN, Route 53 (health checks, latency routing), CloudFront, Global Accelerator, API Gateway. Security, Identity & Compliance: IAM (policies, SCPs, permissions boundaries), KMS, Secrets Manager, Security Hub, GuardDuty, Macie, Certificate Manager, WAF, Shield. Management & Governance: AWS Organizations, Control Tower, CloudTrail, Config, Trusted Advisor, Service Quotas, License Manager. Analytics: Athena, Redshift, EMR, Kinesis (Data Streams, Firehose), MSK, QuickSight, OpenSearch Service. AI/ML & Serverless: SageMaker, Bedrock, Rekognition, Comprehend, AppFlow, Step Functions, EventBridge. Developer Tools: CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, Cloud9, X-Ray. Team Leadership & Knowledge Sharing Mentor junior engineers and maintain internal knowledge base. Contribute to internal tooling (custom dashboards, alerting, automation). Required Qualifications 8+ years hands-on experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting production workloads on AWS. AWS Professional-level certification (Solutions Architect Pro or DevOps Engineer Pro) + at least one Specialty (e.g., Security, Networking, Data Analytics, ML). Broad, practical knowledge across compute, storage, database, networking, security, and management tools (see domains above). Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, CDK, or Terraform). Strong scripting: Python (boto3) and shell scripting; experience with automation frameworks. Advanced Troubleshooting (Broad AWS Coverage) Compute: EC2 (AMI baking, Spot, Graviton), Lambda (concurrency, VPC), ECS/EKS (Fargate, Karpenter), Batch, Outposts. Storage:S3 (lifecycle, replication, Event Notifications), EBS (io2 Block Express, snapshots), EFS, FSx (ONTAP, Lustre), Storage Gateway, Backup. Database: RDS (Aurora, Multi-AZ, read replicas), DynamoDB (GSI, DAX, Streams), DocumentDB, Neptune, ElastiCache (Redis/Memcached). Networking & Content Delivery: VPC (peering, TGW, Network Firewall), Direct Connect, Site-to-Site VPN, Route 53 (health checks, latency routing), CloudFront, Global Accelerator, API Gateway. Security, Identity & Compliance: IAM (policies, SCPs, permissions boundaries), KMS, Secrets Manager, Security Hub, GuardDuty, Macie, Certificate Manager, WAF, Shield. Management & Governance: AWS Organizations, Control Tower, CloudTrail, Config, Trusted Advisor, Service Quotas, License Manager. Analytics: Athena, Redshift, EMR, Kinesis (Data Streams, Firehose), MSK, QuickSight, OpenSearch Service. AI/ML & Serverless: SageMaker, Bedrock, Rekognition, Comprehend, AppFlow, Step Functions, EventBridge. Developer Tools: CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, Cloud9, X-Ray. Team Leadership & Knowledge Sharing Broad, practical knowledge across compute, storage, database, networking, security, and management tools (see domains above). Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, CDK, or Terraform). Strong scripting: Python (boto3) and shell scripting; experience with automation frameworks. Mentor junior engineers and maintain internal knowledge base. Contribute to internal tooling (custom dashboards, alerting, automation). Incident Response Proven ability to resolve critical incidents in large-scale environments (include SLA metrics). Familiar with ITIL-style problem management and blameless post-mortems. Lead triage, diagnosis, and resolution of critical (P1/P2) incidents across the AWS ecosystem. Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and deliver customer-facing post-mortem reports with actionable prevention plans. Coordinate with Technical Account Managers (TAMs), Service Teams, and customer stakeholders during live outages. Qualifications Customer-facing role for a minimum of 5+ years 3+ years designing, securing, and deploying large-scale applications and solutions Experience with one of the major cloud vendor environments (development, access, migration) Effectively communicate with, and present to all levels of the organization Subject matter expert in at least one major cloud provider (AWS/Azure/GCP) Architect level development skills in at least one development language (Java, Python, PowerShell, etc.) Strong skills integrating third party tools and solutions Strong project and situational awareness Strong attention to detail Self-starter Well organized Able to travel as required Requirements AI / GenAI Knowledge Requirements Basic understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Generative AI concepts. Exposure to AWS AI/ML services such as Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, Rekognition, Comprehend, Textract, or Lex. Understanding AI-assisted operations, automation, and observability tools. Awareness of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, and AI governance/security best practices. Ability to support AI/ML workloads on cloud infrastructure including GPU-enabled environments. Familiarity with integrating AI services into DevOps and cloud automation workflows is an added advantage. Recognized Technical Expertise Proven skills in multiple billable technologies (as measured by certification/approved training completion/proven abilities) Recognized subject matter expert in professional discipline Depth of knowledge and experience enables contribution in a more complex/critical environment Contributions often exceed the full requirements of the expected competencies relative to one’s current job title Lead vs Contribute Can participate with and lead a team of technical delivery resources across skillsets within a practice to help achieve customer’s business goals and technology needs Can participate in and lead written deliverable creation across areas of expertise Provides measurable input into AHEAD new products, processes, standards, and / or plans Able to provide time estimates for work that needs to be accomplished based on the available information Coordinates cross-practice and can contribute to cross-practice deliverables using current templates Self-starter in finding work during non-scheduled work hours Prioritizes and completes tasks independently on-time or ahead of schedule Able to lead development and testing activities Achieve high team standards. Contributes to the refinement of methodology and best practices to establish quality and effectiveness Initiate and participate in authoring PCR requests when additional work is being requested Architect Skills Depth and demonstrated expertise across at least one technology Able to architect and lead deployment of moderately complex solutions related to cloud solutions Understands performance, scaling and functional characteristics of software technologies Ability to understand open-source and cloud use-cases, and recommend standard design patterns commonly used in such solutions (best practices) Certifications – good to have AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (Preferred) AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (Preferred) HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty (Good to Have) Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer (Good to Have) Communications (verbal and written) Communicates with external customers, which may include senior management, on matters that require explanation, interpretation, and/or advising Often exceeds expectations with respect to customer expectations (communications, meets commitments, etc.) Able to work with outside vendors on internal or customer related issues Participate in pre-sales activities including scoping, positioning, technology adoption and maturation Able to identify new client opportunities inside of the POD and communicate those to upper management including the Team Lead Can communicate beyond tactics and technology and can help customers management set strategic direction Can write and lead complex deliverables within the practice Ability to understand and translate customer requirements into technical requirements Leadership and Influence Works to influence direct team members, broader internal team, and external customers, to agree and accept new concepts, best practices, and approaches Advises and trains more junior staff via mentorship while helping to drive the entire AHEAD platform A reliable resource for marketing on thought leadership pieces for their practice for AHEAD and our customers Has started speaking at industry conferences and/or webinars Contributes to more complex workshops and understands how their area of expertise fits into our stitching message Accepts responsibility for own actions and sometimes those of others as part of a team Works well with immediate, extend and external teams, a true team player Consistently meets expectations in terms of customer facing, writing, presentation and problem solving skills and requires little to no supervision in this area Consistently exhibits a positive attitude towards AHEAD and its customers Willing to go the extra mile when asked to do so (i.e., time outside of normal working hours to support a customer initiative, production roll-out, could also be > 40 hours for short intervals) Consistently pursues self-development and drives the AHEAD business model for self and sometimes others on the team Highly respected by peers and sales team Culture o Support initiatives beyond area of responsibility o Encourage cross team interaction o Motivate people to think creatively o Achieve success through others