PaaS Services Engineering Lead

Introduction

Maryland Benefits (MD Benefits) is a dynamic, cloud-based platform. This enterprise-wide digital service allows organizations to build, test, host, operate, and integrate mission-driven applications, data, and emerging technologies. MD Benefits offers cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities, a shared data architecture, and product development services, all developed by the State of Maryland to help multiple agencies deliver and manage health, human, and social service benefits and programs. On July 1, 2025, the operation of the MD Benefits shared platform and statewide applications transitioned from the Department of Human Services (DHS) to the Department of Information Technology (DoIT).

***This is a contractual position, with limited benefits***

***All hires need to be eligible to work in the U.S., either as a U.S. Citizen or those who have a Permanent Resident or green card, as the state of Maryland does not have the ability to sponsor employees***

***Applicants are required to submit an up-to-date and accurate resume.***

Main Purpose

The PaaS Services Engineering Lead is responsible for the design, and operational excellence of the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer of the Maryland Benefits Platform. This role focuses on providing a secure, scalable, and resilient ecosystem of shared services that enable development teams to build and deploy applications rapidly and reliably. The Lead will own the lifecycle of all services operating on top of the core AWS infrastructure, including container orchestration, service mesh, integration hubs, and data transfer platforms, ensuring they meet the highest standards of performance and availability

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of an PaaS Services Engineering Lead include, but are not limited to the following duties:

• Platform Strategy and Leadership: Develop and maintain the technical roadmap for all PaaS services, aligning with application development needs and business objectives. Act as the primary technical authority for the platform's service layer, providing guidance, mentorship, and support to engineering teams. Establish and enforce best practices, standards, and governance for service configuration, deployment, and security.
• Container Orchestration and Management (EKS): Lead the architecture, deployment, and ongoing management of Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) clusters. Oversee the container ecosystem, including container registries (e.g., Amazon ECR), security scanning, and ingress management. Develop and optimize CI/CD pipelines for automated, secure deployment of applications onto the Kubernetes platform.
• Service Mesh and API Management (Consul, API Gateway): Own the implementation and operation of HashiCorp Consul for service discovery, health checking, and network segmentation within the platform. Collaborate with application teams to integrate services into the mesh, enabling advanced traffic management and resiliency patterns. Manage and support the API Gateway layer, ensuring secure, reliable, and well-documented API exposure.
• Integration and Data Flow: Integration and Data Flow (ESB, GoAnywhere): Manage the enterprise service bus (ESB) and modern messaging/event streaming platforms to facilitate seamless communication between microservices and legacy systems. Administer and support the MFT (Managed File Transfer) service for secure and automated data exchange with external partners and agencies.
• Observability and Operations: Implement and manage a comprehensive observability stack for monitoring, logging, and tracing across all PaaS services. Define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for critical platform services and lead incident response and post-mortem analysis for service-related outages.
• Security and Automation: Integrate and manage security services such as HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager for centralized secrets management. Champion the use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform or CloudFormation to automate the provisioning and configuration of all PaaS resources.

Minimum Qualifications

Education:

A Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university.

Experience:

At least seven (7) years of experience in administrative or professional work, including three (3) years of experience in managing programs or projects.

Proven ability to interact effectively with internal and external customers at all levels including technical team and business users.

Substitutions:

Additional experience in administrative or professional work may be substituted on a year-for-year basis for the required education.

A Master’s degree or higher may be substituted for one year of the required general experience.