AWS DevOps Engineer (Senior) - Migration Project (VMware to AWS)

Mactores is the agent-native AWS modernization firm. Most modernization work doesn't ship, it stalls in pilots, slips a year, or lands at three times the budget. We exist to ship it: production systems running, legacy retired, outcomes measured. Our delivery is built on Aedeon, the agent platform built by Mactores' founders' sister company, which absorbs the repetitive 60–70% of engagement work, discovery, dependency mapping, validation, test generation, that traditional consulting bills human hours against. Forward-deployed engineers own the rest: architecture, judgment, and cutover, on dates we commit to in the contract.

This is a senior role in our Application & Database Modernization pillar, on a specific mission: leading a large-scale VMware-to-AWS migration and landing it in production. VMware estates are exactly where modernization programs go to stall — sprawling dependency graphs, undocumented workloads, and a hypervisor bill that grows while the migration deck gathers dust. Our customers need that estate moved, cut over, and retired, on a date in the contract.

You'll lead the design and implementation of the target infrastructure: Landing Zones built to AWS best practices, EKS-based container platforms, Infrastructure as Code across the stack with Terraform and CloudFormation, and HA, DR, security, and backup strategies that hold up in production. Aedeon absorbs the discovery, dependency-mapping, and validation grind that would otherwise consume the project's first two quarters. You own the judgment calls, architecture tradeoffs, cutover sequencing, risk decisions and you carry them through to production. You'll also mentor engineers and shape long-term infrastructure strategy with customer stakeholders. If you want your migration experience to end in retired VMware clusters rather than revised project plans, this is the role.

What you will do?

• Lead the design and implementation of infrastructure for a large-scale VMware-to-AWS migration — from discovery through production cutover.
• Architect and build secure, scalable, and highly available AWS environments, including Landing Zones that follow AWS best practices.
• Design and implement containerized application platforms on Amazon EKS; exposure to ECS is a plus.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and AWS CloudFormation.
• Define and enforce best practices across security, backups, high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), monitoring, and operations.
• Enable configuration management using tools such as Ansible, Chef, or similar.
• Build CI/CD pipelines and manage the complete build and release lifecycle for customer applications.
• Drive automation across provisioning, deployment, and operational workflows.
• Retire legacy infrastructure and land cloud-native architectures in its place.
• Improve and maintain DevOps platforms: Jenkins, Git repositories, monitoring, and observability stacks.
• Provide L3-level support for complex infrastructure and platform issues.
• Work with stakeholders on technical strategy and long-term architecture.
• Mentor engineers, contribute to talent evaluation, and support team development.

What are we looking for?

• 6+ years of hands-on DevOps experience, with strong expertise in designing and managing cloud infrastructure.
• Strong experience in VMware-to-AWS migration projects or large-scale infrastructure migrations.
• 4+ years of Terraform and CloudFormation for Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• 4+ years in configuration management, systems engineering, and managing production-grade infrastructure.
• Solid Linux and/or Windows administration background.
• Deep understanding of AWS services, including VPC, EC2, IAM, EKS, ECS, RDS, S3, Backup, CloudWatch, etc.
• Experience with Kubernetes (EKS), ECS, and Docker in production environments.
• Hands-on experience designing HA, DR, security, and backup strategies.
• Experience with Landing Zone setup, multi-account strategy, and AWS governance frameworks.
• Proficiency in Git with a strong understanding of branching and merging strategies.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automation, and operational tooling.
• A problem-solving mindset that's proactive and oriented toward reliability, performance, and scalability.

You will be preferred if

• Experience across multiple cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• AWS certifications such as Solutions Architect Associate/Professional or DevOps Engineer Professional.
• Exposure to data platforms such as Amazon EMR, Redshift, Lake Formation, and SageMaker.
• Experience designing cloud architectures at an L3/Architect level.

How we work?

We run a forward-deployed model. Senior engineers embed with the customer's team, own outcomes from discovery through production, and carry the delivery commitment personally fixed dates, with Mactores absorbing overage cost for delays inside our control. Aedeon absorbs scale; you absorb judgment; the contract absorbs risk. On a migration this size, that division of labor is the difference between a cutover and a slide about a cutover. The culture is casual, moves fast, and measures itself by what ships.