Staff Cloud Engineer (Contract-to-Hire) Location: Scottsdale, AZ (preferred) | San Francisco, CA | Chicago, IL Work Model: Hybrid (3 days onsite) Contract Length: 12 months (strong conversion potential) Compensation: $90 $95/hour Work Authorization: Must be authorized to work in the U.S. (no sponsorship available) About the Role Join a leading organization at the center of the U.S. financial ecosystem, powering secure, real-time payments used by hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses every day. As a Staff Cloud Engineer, you'll help modernize and scale cloud infrastructure supporting critical payment platforms. You'll work at the intersection of cloud architecture, platform engineering, and security/compliance, driving solutions that operate at national scale and high reliability. This is a 12-month contract with strong potential to convert full-time.
What You'll Do
- Lead Cloud Architecture Design and implement scalable, secure, and highly available AWS-based systems
- Define architecture patterns and standards used across multiple engineering teams
- Solve complex, open-ended technical challenges at scale
- Drive Cloud Modernization Support migration of large-scale systems from on-prem environments to AWS
- Build resilient systems with strong fault tolerance, observability, and performance
- Strengthen Security & Compliance Partner with audit teams to address findings and implement improvements
- Design systems aligned with security, risk, and compliance frameworks (e.g., SOC 2)
- Ensure systems meet strict requirements for reliability, auditability, and data protection
- Build Internal Platforms & Tooling Lead Infrastructure as Code (IaC) initiatives using Terraform and similar tools
- Create reusable infrastructure components, APIs, and deployment pipelines
- Improve the developer experience by simplifying and standardizing cloud infrastructure
- Collaborate & Influence Work cross-functionally with engineering, product, and security teams Drive alignment on technical decisions across multiple teams
- Act as a key contributor to long-term cloud strategy
- Operate at Scale Troubleshoot complex distributed system issues in production
- Improve monitoring, alerting, and system reliability
- Continuously elevate engineering practices and standards
What You Bring
Core Experience 8+ years of experience in cloud engineering, distributed systems, or platform engineering Strong expertise in AWS (compute, networking, storage, security, observability) Experience designing highly scalable, resilient systems
Technical Skills Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar) Kubernetes (EKS or equivalent) and containerized environments CI/CD pipeline design and automation Strong understanding of networking, DNS, HTTP, TLS, and load balancing
Architecture & Leadership Experience owning and driving technical architecture across teams Ability to influence decisions without direct authority Proven track record building systems used by multiple engineering teams
Development Background Strong foundation in backend development (Java/Spring or similar) Ability to debug and support application-layer issues when needed
Preferred Experience Work in regulated or high-security environments Exposure to audit processes or SOC 2 controls Experience with event-driven systems (Kafka, messaging frameworks) FinTech or payments systems experience Cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, or similar)
What Success Looks Like Deliver secure, scalable cloud solutions supporting critical financial systems Improve system reliability, performance, and compliance posture Enable engineering teams through better infrastructure, tooling, and standards Influence cloud strategy and make a measurable impact across the organization
Why Join Work on high-impact systems that power real-time financial transactions nationwide Help shape the future of a modern cloud platform at scale Operate at a staff engineering level, influencing architecture and direction Collaborate with talented teams focused on innovation, security, and reliability
For applications and inquiries, contact:[email protected]
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