AWS Administrator

BQMI has a rewarding position as an AWS Administrator. This is a new position within the NASA Safety Center (NSC) supporting an established development team. The Customer is seeking an AWS Administrator to support mission applications hosted in AWS and AWS GovCloud environments. This role ensures secure, resilient, and compliant cloud operations that enable NASA programs across centers and mission directorates. They will integrate existing applications, data sources, and M365/SharePoint solutions, while meeting Customer policy, security, accessibility, and governance requirements.

The mission of the NASA Safety Center (NSC) is to provide Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) training and development expertise, information, verification and analysis to enable collaboration and learning while promoting a safe workplace and successful programs and projects. The NSC’s vision is to be NASA’s preeminent resource for subject matter expertise, data and tools.

 

Essential Duties & Responsibilities 

• Manage and maintain NASA AWS/AWS GovCloud environments in alignment with NIST SP 800‑53, FedRAMP, and NASA OCIO cloud policies.
• Configure and administer EC2, S3, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, KMS, RDS, Lambda, and related services.
• Implement secure networking by designing private/public subnet architectures, security groups, load balancers, and VPC endpoints; experience working within agency network/firewall constraints (NASA-routable subnets, CIDR restrictions, Kion-managed environments a plus)
• Building pipelines that produce, tag, and push Docker images to ECR and deploy to ECS, including self-hosted Linux runners and GitHub Enterprise integration
• Support application teams with deployments, migrations, and modernization, including containerized workloads (ECS/ECR, Docker).
• Automate provisioning using Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK.
• .NET application migration and Containerizing ASP.NET MVC Core for Linux and re-platforming ASP.NET Web Forms, which requires Windows container experience or a .NET modernization strategy (Web Forms cannot run on Linux)
• Maintain monitoring, logging, auditing, and incident response integrations with NASA SOC.
• Ensure adherence to NASA tagging standards, documentation requirements, and change control.
• Collaborate with security, networking, and mission system owners across NASA centers.
• Building least-privilege roles and policies, managing TLS certificates, and enforcing secrets hygiene in a federal/government compliance context (FedRAMP/GovCloud a plus)
• Provide recommendations on technology direction to align with business vision, including load balancing applications, appropriate security measures/vulnerabilities mitigation and user assistance.
• Applies advanced technical knowledge of application networking, including load balancing applications, and ensuring fault tolerance
• Analyzes and resolves end user software program and connectivity issues.
• Conducts capacity and performance analysis and provides system configuration change and upgrade recommendations  

Essential Skills:

• Working knowledge and experience designing, building, and operating scalable batch and streaming data pipelines using AWS Glue, Apache Spark, PySpark, Python, and SQL, applying distributed computing principles—including parallelism, fault tolerance, idempotency, and eventual consistency to process high-volume, high-velocity, and diverse datasets reliably.
• Working knowledge and experience architecting and optimizing AWS data lake and analytics solutions using Amazon S3, Athena, Lake Formation, and the Glue Data Catalog, with expertise in data modeling, schema evolution, partition projection, file compaction, Parquet and Avro formats, workgroup controls, security, query performance, and cost optimization.
• Working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code – Terraform, CloudFormation, or AWS CDK for repeatable, scalable provisioning across multiple applications
• Working knowledge of DNS management specifically, Route 53 configuration, including ALB aliases and DNS-to-certificate validation
• Working knowledge of consistent resource tagging and naming conventions, centralized logging, and end-to-end validation across connectivity, health, and pipeline functionality
• Hands-on expertise with ECS (Fargate/EC2), ECR, RDS for SQL Server, S3, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, and ACM
• Strong Docker skills, including hardened base images and validating builds/runtime locally 

Experience/Education:

• Bachelor’s degree, preferably within computer science or 3+ years for related work experience
• Qualified candidates will have 3+ years of hands-on experience designing and managing production AWS environments.
• A combination of education, training, or certification that provides the requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities may be substituted for the degree.
• Prior Federal government, defense, or contracting experience is highly desirable

Personality or self-management skills:

• Strong documentation and knowledge-transfer skills, and effective collaboration with security and network teams in a controlled environment
• Strong communication, presentation, and storytelling skills
• Experience collaborating with multiple cross-functional partners
• Experience working in a fast-paced, iterative environment where multi-tasking and time-management skills are critical
• Thrive under pressure and enjoy working in an environment with competing priorities
• Experience supporting developers in the implementation of design deliverables
• Ability to perform work within specific timeframes and adhere to deadlines
• Willingness to keep skills current and quickly adapt to new technologies, as needed. 

Remote, hybrid, and onsite positions, the employee bears travel costs to the nearest NASA Center for badging and the issuance of NASA IT equipment.

For a Remote or Hybrid position, the employee must have a reliable internet connection and be able to VPN into the NASA network to conduct work.

In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification form upon hire.