Cloud Infrastructure & AI Operations Engineer (On-Site Only)

About Pioneer Circuits Since its establishment in 1981, Pioneer Circuits has been leading the way in technology solutions for mission-critical systems. As the leading, privately held U.S. manufacturer of innovative high-performance flexible circuit boards, we are dedicated to the design, production, and assembly of advanced printed circuit board assembly (PCBAs) technology solutions.   We develop cutting-edge solutions that explore new frontiers, serve and protect our armed forces and allies, safeguard national security against evolving threats, and propel advancements in hypersonic technology.   Our customers include some of the largest aerospace and defense companies like RTX, Lockheed Martin, GE Aerospace, NASA, JPL, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing.   About the Opportunity We are building the cloud and data backbone for a manufacturing floor that is becoming genuinely intelligent — AI-driven scheduling, computer-vision inspection, digital work orders, and a unified data layer running in AWS GovCloud. This role builds and runs that infrastructure.   This is a hands-on engineering role, not a systems administration role. You will make architecture and / or tooling decisions, write infrastructure as code, build pipelines, instrument systems so they explain themselves, and work directly alongside our AI and Automation engineers to get models and services into production inside a regulated environment.   We are deliberately open on years of experience, with one exception: you need to have worked in AWS. Everything we are building runs there, and we are not in a position to teach the platform from scratch. Beyond that, we would rather hire a sharp engineer with strong fundamentals, real automation instincts, and obvious momentum than someone with a longer resume and less curiosity. If you have provisioned AWS with Terraform, shipped through CI/CD, containerized an application, and wired up an AI-powered tool because you wanted to see if it would work — you are the profile we are looking for. Defense and compliance experience is something we will teach you.   What You’ll Do Infrastructure as code and automation   Build and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform (or CloudFormation/CDK) so environments are repeatable, reviewable, and version-controlled   Write automation in Python, Bash, or PowerShell to remove manual steps and speed up recurring work   Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application deployment using  GitLab CI.   Apply configuration management at scale using Ansible, AWS Systems Manager, or similar tooling   Cloud environments and containerized workloads   Design, deploy, and operate secure cloud environments across AWS GovCloud and Microsoft 365 GCC High, supporting containerized applications and serverless architectures   Package and run containerized services using Docker, growing into orchestration on ECS or EKS   Build with managed and serverless services — Lambda, S3, API Gateway, Step Functions — rather than standing up servers by default   Observability, reliability, and cloud cost   Deploy centralized logging, distributed tracing, and real-time monitoring across hybrid cloud and on-premise environments using CloudWatch, or similar platforms   Automate monitoring configuration and alerting as code so observability ships with the infrastructure rather than after it   Track and alert on cloud cost and usage changes, and surface optimization opportunities to engineering leadership   Use AI-assisted anomaly detection and log analysis to find problems before they reach the floor, and grow into defining SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for critical systems   Security and compliance in a regulated environment   Support continuous compliance with CMMC, NIST SP 800-171, ITAR, and DFARS requirements as we prepare for third-party assessment   Implement identity and access management, single sign-on, least-privilege policy, and encryption in transit and at rest   Document systems, configurations, and control evidence to a standard that holds up under audit   Contribute to endpoint management and EDR/XDR operations across Windows, Linux, and macOS   What You’ll Bring AWS experience.  Demonstrable, hands-on experience building and operating on AWS — not classroom or certification-only exposure. You should be able to walk us through services you have personally deployed and what went wrong the first time. We expect working familiarity with the core set: IAM, S3, EC2, VPC and networking, CloudWatch, and Lambda, plus at least one managed service you have used in anger   AWS through infrastructure as code.  You have provisioned AWS resources through code rather than the console — Terraform preferred, CloudFormation or CDK accepted   Certification.  AWS certification at any level — Cloud Practitioner, any Associate, or higher. If your hands-on depth outruns your credentials, say so in your application; we will consider it Core Competencies Infrastructure as code. Hands-on experience writing infrastructure as code, ideally Terraform   CI/CD.  You have built or meaningfully contributed to a deployment pipeline in Azure DevOps, GitLab, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or similar   Scripting and development.  Practical proficiency in Python and Bash.   Containers.  You have built and run containerized applications with Docker or Podman   Observability.  Experience with a monitoring or observability platform such as Datadog, CloudWatch, Grafana, or Splunk   Applied AI.  You have built something real with modern AI tooling — an LLM-backed application, a RAG pipeline, a chatbot, or an ML workflow. Personal and academic projects count   Communication.  You write documentation people can actually follow, and you can explain a technical decision to someone in operations or quality   Preferred Qualifications Advanced AWS certification — Solutions Architect Prof