Cloud Systems Engineer

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.

DEFCON AI is an insights company that leverages artificial intelligence, mathematical optimization, data analytics, and software engineering for resilient optimization of complex systems.
In today’s dynamically changing world, DEFCON AI’s technology aligns outcomes with operational goals, better decision making, and empowers customers to anticipate assess, and mitigate the impacts of disruptions.

DEFCON AI is hiring a Cloud Systems Engineer to administer AWS, Microsoft Azure, and our Microsoft 365 and Entra ID tenant. This is a single, senior seat covering both halves of the environment — the infrastructure that runs our workloads and the identity plane that governs who reaches them — with end-to-end ownership of each.

The work spans virtual machine provisioning and network architecture, Infrastructure as Code, tenant and identity administration, endpoint management, automation, and continuous monitoring. We operate under defense-sector compliance obligations, so security hardening and audit-ready documentation are part of the job rather than an afterthought. Experience in regulated or compliance-driven environments — defense, healthcare, or financial services — is a strong plus.

• Administer and maintain AWS and Azure environments, including day-to-day operations of virtual machines, networking, and storage across both providers.
• AWS: deploy, maintain, and optimize EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, and CloudTrail; manage VPCs, subnets, routing tables, security groups, and NACLs.
• Azure: administer virtual machines, virtual networks and NSGs, storage accounts, Azure Files, Key Vault, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Site Recovery across subscriptions.
• Build and manage hardened VM images and golden images for consistent, repeatable deployments.
• Implement and support high availability, auto-scaling, backup, and disaster recovery configurations.
• Support multi-account and multi-subscription governance structures — AWS Organizations, Azure Management Groups, and equivalent landing-zone constructs.

• Own the Microsoft 365 tenant end to end: Entra ID, Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and licensing.
• Administer the identity plane — Conditional Access policies, MFA enforcement, RBAC and least privilege, privileged access, hybrid identity, and application registrations. and role assignments, and conditional access policies
• Run the full user lifecycle: provisioning, onboarding, role changes, offboarding, and access reviews, automated wherever the volume justifies it.
• Manage the endpoint fleet through Intune, including compliance policies, configuration profiles, patching, and device lifecycle.
• Administer single sign-on and provisioning integrations (SAML, SCIM) between Entra ID and the SaaS platforms we operate.
• Support data governance and protection through Purview, sensitivity labels, and DLP policy where applicable.

• Design and maintain infrastructure using Terraform — modular design, remote state management, and workspace strategy — across both AWS and Azure.
• Build reusable, secure baseline modules for network architecture, IAM roles, logging, monitoring, and encryption.
• Automate operational workflows in PowerShell, Bash, and Python, including Microsoft Graph API automation for identity and tenant tasks.
• Integrate infrastructure provisioning and security controls into CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or equivalent) and maintain version-controlled infrastructure repositories.
• Implement automated drift detection and remediation, and enforce policy-as-code guardrails.

• Apply and maintain hardening baselines (CIS Benchmarks, DISA STIGs) across Linux and Windows systems and cloud tenants.
• Configure and monitor AWS CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub, and Config alongside Microsoft Defender and Entra ID sign-in and audit logging.
• Support SIEM integration (Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, or equivalent) and assist with incident response.
• Maintain the vulnerability management lifecycle: patching, remediation tracking, and reporting.
• Support compliance aligned to NIST SP 800-171, CMMC, and FedRAMP or SOC 2 as applicable, including evidence collection for assessments.

• Administer the AI platforms in our environment — Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, AWS Bedrock, and Microsoft 365 Copilot — including seats and licensing, SSO and provisioning, retention and data controls, connector and agent governance, and spend limits.
• Enforce and communicate standards for what data may be placed into AI tooling, particularly where CUI or controlled data is involved.

• Partner with engineering, security, and operations to deliver reliable, scalable services
• Produce and maintain architecture diagrams, runbooks, SOPs, and audit evidence artifacts without being asked for them
• Contribute to capacity forecasting, resource planning, and cloud cost management.

• Microsoft 365 GCC High tenant experience.
• Terraform depth including modular design, state management, and leading IaC migrations from legacy tooling.
• Container platform experience — Docker with ECS, EKS, or AKS.
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator, Security Specialty) or Azure equivalents (AZ-104); Microsoft 365 Administrator (MS-102); CompTIA Security+.
• AWS Control Tower, Landing Zones, or Azure Landing Zone governance tooling.
• SIEM platform experience (Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel).
• Administration of AI platforms at the tenant or account level - Anthropic, OpenAI, Bedrock and Copilot 
• Managed service provider background administering across many client tenants.
• Regulated-industry experience: defense (CMMC, NIST 800-171), healthcare (HIPAA), or financial services (SOC 2).
• Active DoD security clearance (Secret or above), or eligibility to obtain and maintain one.

• Infrastructure and identity ownership — takes end-to-end accountability for the health, security, and performance of both the infrastructure and the identity plane.
• Automation mindset — proactively replaces manual processes with scalable, repeatable solutions.
• Security-first thinking — embeds security into every layer of design and operations rather than bolting it on.
• Cross-functional communication — translates technical complexity for business and compliance stakeholders.
• Disciplined documentation — produces clear, audit-ready artifacts without being prompted.
• Adaptability — comfortable across cloud providers, toolchains, and an evolving compliance landscape.

• AWS, Azure, and the Microsoft 365 tenant are stable, secure, observable, and documented.
• Identity is governed: access follows least privilege, joiners and leavers are handled cleanly, and access reviews are routine.
• Infrastructure changes are repeatable through code, with clear review and rollback paths.
• Monitoring, logging, and vulnerability remidiation are routine rather than scramble-driven.
• Audit artifacts - diagrams, runbooks, evidence - stay current and usable.