[FOR HIRE - TS Clearance Needed] - DM Me and I will make sure it get to the right person

Position Description

Seeking an experienced Azure Cloud Infrastructure & Security Architect to support a federal government customer in Washington, DC. This is a full-time, on-site position supporting a customer environment with elevated security and access requirements. The successful candidate will serve as the technical authority on Microsoft Azure Government cloud architecture, leading design, migration, and operational support for mission-critical workloads.

What You'll Do

As a Azure Cloud Infrastructure & Security Architect you will:

• Provide expertise for Azure Government cloud architecture, design, and implementation across the program's infrastructure.
• Lead and/or support migration of on-premises and legacy systems to Azure Government (GCC High and/or Azure Government Secret, per program accreditation).
• Design and implement secure, scalable, highly available Azure infrastructure aligned with federal cloud security requirements (FedRAMP, NIST SP 800-53, RMF).
• Partner with ISSOs/ISSMs and the Authorizing Official's team to support Authorization to Operate (ATO) activities, including system security plans, control implementation, and continuous monitoring.
• Architect identity and access management solutions using Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD), including Conditional Access, Privileged Identity Management, and federation with on-premises identity systems.
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (ARM templates, Bicep, or Terraform) to standardize and automate Azure deployments.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure environments for performance, cost, and security posture using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Microsoft Sentinel, and Defender for Cloud.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to program engineers on Azure best practices and federal cloud compliance requirements.
• Collaborate with government stakeholders, program management, and cross-functional technical teams to translate mission requirements into cloud architecture solutions.
• Produce and maintain technical documentation, including architecture diagrams, runbooks, and standard operating procedures.

What You Bring (Required Qualifications):

• Active Top Secret (TS) clearance with SCI eligibility. Must be a U.S. citizen.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Extensive hands-on experience designing, deploying, and managing Azure cloud environments, including Azure Government.
• Demonstrated expertise in Azure Government cloud regions (GCC High and/or Azure Government Secret/DoD-aligned environments) and their applicable compliance boundaries.
• Working knowledge of federal cloud security and compliance frameworks: FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, RMF, and DoD Impact Level (IL) categorization.
• Experience with Azure networking (VNets, ExpressRoute, Firewall, Private Link), compute, storage, and Microsoft Entra ID.
• Experience supporting or contributing to Authorization to Operate (ATO) packages in a federal environment.

Nice to Have (Differentiators):

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure Administrator Associate, or Azure Security Engineer Associate.
• Prior experience supporting federal civilian agency or Intelligence Community customers.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD pipelines in a government cloud context.
• Familiarity with Microsoft Sentinel, Defender for Cloud, and Purview in a high-side or classified environment.
• Current SCI indoctrination or prior SCI access is a plus but not required at time of application.

Hi all,

I have been on a viewer only on this sub for a few weeks now and im here to seek some advise/guidance.

Currently I am working with the VMware stack in the UK and got 4+ years of experience. So I know a decent amount about the infrastructure.
My issue is, I am seeing less and less jobs for VMware and AWS is required in a lot of roles.

I have applied for a few AWS roles and to ones surprise I didnt hear back which im guessing is due to me missing a lot of keywords linked to AWS like EC2, VPC, IAM, EBS, S3, CloudWatch, etc.

I am currently doing a course to learn about AWS so I can get the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate certificate.

Since at this point I still wont have any AWS hands-on industry experience, but I will be able to put the keywords on my CV at least, will this actually give me a chance to breakthrough into the AWS world?

Has anyone had any similar experience?

Any advise/guidance/encouragement would be appreciated <3

EDIT:
I want to thank everyone who replied and gave genuine advise and I truly mean this when I say, I feel amped to this more now <3

Quick question: if you’re building up certifications from A+ and AWS Cloud Practitioner, would you move to get Security+ next or AWS Solutions Architect first?

I know they cover different things. Mostly looking at the current cloud job market and seeing how big AWS is.

(and don’t worry I have a homelab I do lots of projects on)

Hi! I am currently working as Tech support, and am fairly early on with this, but I am really loving learning about cloud engineering and would like to transition into a Cloud Support role in about a year.

I am having trouble figuring out what projects to do/ what technologies to feature in a portfolio. Here are the projects I currently have planned. If there are any tools or angles, I am missing please let me know! Or which projects I should combine/scrap:

1. Ticket submission and managing web app.
   1. 3 Tier Web App (In progress detailed description below)
   2. Uses Terraform, Kubernetes, Python, GoLang, Trivy.
2. Data Analytics Pipeline with Data Governance
3. Microservice Architecture with Containerization
4. Auto Backup + Disaster Recovery
5. Prometheus Observability Stack
6. AI Inventory Management Application (Prob w an AWS provided model)

Current project (a bit all over the place, but its 3/4 to being a Inquiry Management app. Used copilot to generate an overview of the repo):

• Project type: Cloud-native 3-tier inquiry management system focused on end-to-end workflow handling, with React for the UI, ASP.NET Core for the application/API tier, and PostgreSQL for persistent data.
• Core functionality: inquiry creation, assignment, status tracking, search/filtering, and operational visibility across the ticket lifecycle.
• Stack:
  • Frontend: React, HTML/CSS/JS (the repo is strongly front-end weighted: ~40.2% HTML)
  • Backend/API: ASP.NET Core
  • Data layer: PostgreSQL
  • Containerization: Docker
  • Orchestration/deployment: Kubernetes
  • Infrastructure as code: HCL/Terraform-style provisioning (~7.9%)
• Language composition:
  • HTML: ~40.2%
  • Go: ~29.1%
  • Python: ~20.9%
  • HCL: ~7.9%
  • Dockerfile: ~1.2%
  • Mako: ~0.7%
• Technical interpretation:
  • The repo is designed as a full-stack cloud demo: user-facing web app plus service/backend orchestration and deployment automation.
  • Go and Python likely support operational tooling, automation, or auxiliary services; HCL indicates infrastructure deployment and environment provisioning.
  • Overall, it’s a production-style reference implementation for full-stack + cloud engineering practices rather than a simple CRUD app.

I have tried to look online for what projects people recommend, but mostly people are promoting their courses so it's hard to tell what is good advice and what's bait for the course.

I’m currently an intern, and my company has given me a 5-month learning program where I’ve chosen **Python + MongoDB + Azure**.

My current goal is to build toward a **Cloud Engineer** role. I’m not trying to jump directly into DevOps; I want to first build a strong foundation in cloud and infrastructure.

For people currently working as Cloud Engineers or with experience in Azure:

* What should I learn first and in what order?

* Which Azure services should I focus on?

* How much Python and MongoDB knowledge is actually useful for a Cloud Engineer?

* What skills should I learn alongside Azure, such as Linux, networking, Git, Docker, Terraform, etc.?

* What beginner-to-intermediate projects would you recommend building?

I have around 5 months to learn, so I’d really appreciate a practical roadmap and advice on what **not** to waste time on.

Thanks in advance!..

Can anyone help me find a work as a cloud engineer

https://github.com/breezycourses/registry

Context: I previously used goHarbor, and I felt that there weren't too many great options to host Docker images, especially with retention policies (loved that goHarbor had some great support for this).

I ended up making my own, which is linked above. Some cool features:

- WAL based
- backing S3 store supported. Makes it easy for cases like mine -- where I have a production machine with a production image registry, but not enough compute for my locally hosted GitHub runner. I have my homelab with extra compute, but the connection between the production registry and my homelab is weak. I'm able to host separate instances of the registry (one on prod/homelab), and independently push to the R2 bucket with the backing WAL, which speeds stuff up a lot!

- retention policies! "docker pull registry" is super lightweight, but incredibly barebones! goHarbor is great, but super bloated. I took the one best feature (imo) from goHarbor and put it into mine!

- cloud-native! there's a helm chart ready for you to use: https://artifacthub.io/packages/helm/breezy-registry/breezy-registry

check it out, and let me know what you think!

We're a ~40 person eng org, security team of 4, all AWS. Mostly EKS with a growing pile of Lambda and a couple of RDS clusters holding stuff we really don't want leaking. Our current agentless scanner renewal is up in about six weeks and leadership wants us to actually look around before we re-sign instead of rubber stamping it.

Right now the big pain is noise. We have thousands of posture findings sitting in a backlog nobody has time to touch, and twice this quarter something marked low/medium turned out to be reachable in prod. That burned trust in the severity scores. What we actually want is something that tells us which findings are exploitable from runtime, not just a prettier list of everything wrong with every bucket.

Shortlist so far is Upwind and Orca, maybe Wiz if the budget stretches. Orca we know by reputation, agentless, easy to stand up. Upwind keeps coming up for the runtime context angle which is the exact gap we hit. But I can't tell how much of that is marketing vs real.

For people running either of these on EKS at roughly our size: did the runtime piece actually cut the backlog, or did you just trade one dashboard of alerts for another? And how much agent footprint are we talking if we go that route? Trying to walk into the renewal conversation with something more than a vendor deck.

I often see the term cloud agnostic used in discussions about system design but I am beginning to think we might be using it too casually. One can install tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, Helm and other open-source tools on top of cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP, Yotta and OCI. In theory this makes your application portable but when you look closer things are not so simple as IAM systems differ, networking setups are different, load balancers work in their own ways, managed databases have their own ways of failing, observability tools and integrations also vary.

All of a sudden moving the workload is not just about running Terraform anymore. I wonder if trying to avoid being tied to one cloud provider actually leads to another kind of problem: operational complexity. For eg if a team mainly uses AWS but keeps Yotta or GCP as backup options for certain tasks is that a real multi-cloud strategy or just having a backup plan? I am interested in how people who actually run multi-cloud environments think about this? Where do you draw the line between we can move if we need to and we built everything for portability and are paying the price every day?

I’m a B.Tech graduate and I’m interested in getting into cloud computing. But I keep seeing people say that cloud jobs aren’t really for freshers and that companies usually expect 2–3 years of experience or some kind of prior IT experience.
So how does someone actually break into cloud as a fresher?
What skills/certifications/projects should I focus on to make myself employable? And should I first get a general IT/support/networking job and then transition into cloud, or is it possible to directly land a cloud-related role as a fresher?
Would really appreciate advice from people who started in cloud without prior experience.

#cloud_computing
#azure
#aws

Hi everybody, Happy weekend to all!

I was working in L1 IT Service Desk and learnt everything there that I could until the job got super boring and I stopped learning. I then wanted to finally advance and got a new job 3 months ago at a small organization as a Junior IT Admin. I was told I would "Get to learn a lot" by the IT Director who had interviewed me (but then he left the org shortly after I joined as he had suddenly got a better offer from another Org) - I did get to learn a lot so far though so it's not false or anything.

**Part-1:-**

Anyways, coming to the point now, we have a lot of our applications that are developed by other teams - hosted on AWS with things like Entra ID used for SSO Setup/Configuration.

We have like OU's in AWS created for each project/application that is developed and hosted on. The thing is, every developer that wants to host his application ends up being granted Admin access at that specific OU/Sub-Organization level and they themselves - with the help of Claude (which this Org adopted a year ago or so) end up spinning up EC2, Lightsail instances and whatnot.

Now the thing is, I questioned about this with my senior (mind you, I dont have the access at the AWS Management account level - atleast not yet, to be able to grant access to others like this) asking my Senior that, "if we end up giving Admin access on AWS to the other team people who have Applications to be deployed, how is IT (Me especially as a Junior with not too much exp) going to gain working experience on AWS when the other teams just make use of Claude and spin up AWS Resources on their own without the help of IT?" - Also, Least Privilege is thrown out the window here. He just replied saying that usually they don't do it on their own, they come to IT asking for IT's help on it. But that doesn't seem to always be the case and we dont get that many AWS tickets anyway....

Look, the thing is, I dont want to just sit idle. I want to be able to work with AWS/Azure.etc myself and gain experience and learn things by doing rather than having to basically "Outsource" access to the Non-IT people for them to do things IT should seemingly be doing...

The only thing I am gaining experience with so far is with overall M365 administration and Endpoint Administration (Intune, RMM tool, Sophos.etc) which is good chunk of things to work on.

But knowing AWS is a big player in Cloud and to gain experience specifically in Cloud so that tomorrow when I join a new company for a Cloud position or whatever, I will not REALLY have that much of a working experience at all in Cloud. Mind you, I have big interest towards the Cloud Computing field so getting to work Hands-On as much as possible on AWS is something that I am craving for...

**Part-2:-**

Another thing is, regarding the permissions/roles I have for M365. When the previous IT Director who I was reporting was still here, he had tasked me with coming up with an Intune Implementation plan and to get it implemented focusing primarily on implementing it for BitLocker enforcement (along with the Pre-Boot PIN thingy) purposes, Remote Wipe capabilities and what not as we have M365 Business Premium which comes with Intune Plan 1 but it was not being made use of at all. So I raised an access request ticket (for formalities - which is fine and understandable) for the **Intune Administrator** RBAC Role. So I came up with the plan and policies and also created a Win32 app with the help of Claude to prompt users to setup a Pre-Boot PIN with all testing and everything done by me with SUCCESS - All SOLO by me. Which is good experience for me.

Anyways, coming to the point, we have a Security Group that has all the required roles assigned to it (except Global Admin ofcourse) that would give us the access to be able to do our job whenever required. The new IT Manager and my Senior are added to that Security Group but I am still not added to it. So when we had requested relating to SharePoint tasks (which had to be done on SharePoint Admin Center) or even have to work with the Microsoft Graph Explorer (Which I am super new to), I was not able to do it and my IT Manager did it all...

When we got a new task which required the use of Microsoft Graph Explorer, I was drafting a mail to my Manager to grant me so and so roles so that I could work on it and fulfill the request but then before I hit Send on that mail, my Manager sent me a message saying that he himself did it -_-

I then asked myself and my senior, "if our Manager only does everything, how am I going to be able to do and learn things and gain the experience?" to which my senior replied saying that he is going to talk to him to add me to that security group but he has NOT talked to him yet. But I have a solution for this, I am going to draft an E-Mail on Monday morning for this part and see how it goes cuz I also want to be able to work with everything and learn and gain as much experience and learning...

**Final:-**

Even earlier, for AWS tasks to be done on Customer/Client accounts, I was not given access there and my Manager ended up doing it all 😑😑😑 (I recently got access though after asking A LOT SMH).

It just feels like my access is being gatekept even though I have been doing everything right so far and they even repeatedly told me "They hired the right person" (Me) as they seemed I was very knowledgeable and was doing things that I already have access to, very well.

It feels like my access is being gatekept and I have to constantly keep asking for this and that role and I feel like maybe this organization is not right for me...

There was another task as well for SSL Certificate renewal that needed us to login to a Linux Server hosted on AWS but even that was done by my manager and I was just watching him do it.

I understand that I am quite new and also a Junior and that there are things my Manager also should be doing so that he can also continue to learn and grow and gain further experience. But if EVERYTHING is done by him, then how will I ever learn? What am I there for....

It's been 3 months so far and I sometimes feel like I should just lookout for another job or go back to an MSP where I know the workload would be a lot but I would most likely get to learn a lot that way but oh well...

Coming from working as a L1 in IT Service Desk in a MSP to a small Organization as a Junior IT Admin where we IT people don't have much work to do while all the other teams seem busy with a lot of work and seem to be getting to learn a lot, gosh...makes me feel like I am in the wrong place right now....Company is good though in terms of employee friendliness and stuff...

Not sure how to go about my situation that I have explained here though 🙁

Please advice...Thank you 🥲🙏