Hiring :: AWS L3 SME (Subject Matter Expert) :: Warren, NJ (Onsite)

[Uma Adhikari]

Hi ,

My name is Uma, and I am a Sr. Technical Recruiter at E-Solutions Inc. I am reaching out to you for an excellent job opportunity with one of my top tier clients across America. If you are available and looking for something exciting, please revert with your updated resume.

Title: AWS L3 SME (Subject Matter Expert)

Location: Warren, NJ (Onsite)

USC , GC and h4ead only

 

About the Role

We are seeking a highly experienced AWS L3 SME (Subject Matter Expert) to serve as the senior technical authority and onshore delivery lead for a strategic managed services engagement in New Jersey. This is a dual-mandate role — you are simultaneously the face of the delivery organisation to the client and the technical escalation anchor for a 24x7 offshore managed services team based in India.

This is not a back-office architecture role. You will be onsite at the client location three days a week, managing daily stakeholder relationships, leading technical governance, and personally resolving the complex, high-impact issues that the offshore L1/L2 team escalates to you. Your technical credibility will be tested daily — by a client that expects their L3 SME to have answers, not just process escalations.

The right candidate thrives at the intersection of deep AWS technical expertise, managed services operational discipline, and client-facing leadership — someone who can close out a P1 incident bridge call, walk into a client steering meeting two hours later, and spend the afternoon reviewing architecture improvement proposals from the offshore team

 

Key Responsibilities

L3 Technical Escalation & Resolution

• Serve as the ultimate technical escalation point (L3) for all AWS infrastructure issues escalated from the offshore L1/L2 managed services team — owning resolution from initial escalation through RCA and permanent fix.
• Personally lead and drive P1 and P2 incident resolution — joining bridge calls, directing the offshore team's troubleshooting approach, making real-time architectural decisions under pressure, and managing client communication throughout the incident lifecycle.
• Perform deep-dive root cause analysis (RCA) for recurring or high-impact incidents, producing high-quality RCA documents suitable for direct client review by senior technical stakeholders.
• Identify and drive permanent remediation of underlying architectural and operational issues discovered through incident analysis — distinguishing between tactical fixes and strategic remediation.
• Maintain deep, current hands-on proficiency across core AWS services used in the client environment — EC2, VPC, S3, IAM, RDS, Aurora, EKS, ECS, Lambda, CloudFront, Route53, CloudWatch, AWS Config, Security Hub, GuardDuty, and related services.
• Own technical knowledge management for the engagement — ensuring runbooks, SOPs, and troubleshooting guides are accurate, comprehensive, and regularly updated based on incident learnings.

 

Offshore Team Leadership & Guidance

• Lead, guide, and technically mentor the offshore India-based managed services team operating across 24x7 shift rotations — setting clear technical standards, quality expectations, and escalation thresholds.
• Conduct regular technical enablement sessions with the offshore team — covering new AWS services, client environment changes, lessons learned from incidents, and runbook improvements.
• Review and approve offshore team deliverables before they reach the client — including incident reports, RCA documents, change requests, capacity reports, and governance packs — ensuring quality, accuracy, and professional presentation.
• Establish clear escalation protocols — defining what the offshore team resolves independently (L1/L2), what warrants L3 escalation, and what requires immediate client notification, ensuring the offshore team exercises sound judgment and doesn't under- or over-escalate.
• Drive continuous improvement within the offshore team — identifying skill gaps, recommending training, improving runbook coverage, increasing automation, and systematically reducing repeat incidents.
• Ensure seamless shift handover discipline — reviewing handover notes, flagging open items, and ensuring nothing falls through the gap between India shift transitions or between offshore and onshore hours.
• Act as the onshore escalation bridge — being reachable for critical offshore escalations outside standard business hours for P1 situations, and ensuring the offshore team has a clear escalation path at all times.

 

Client Stakeholder Management

• Serve as the primary daily point of contact for client technical stakeholders — including infrastructure leads, cloud engineering managers, operations directors, and where required, VP/Director-level leadership.
• Build and maintain trusted, peer-level relationships with client technical stakeholders — earning credibility through consistent delivery, proactive communication, and demonstrated AWS depth.
• Communicate incident status, risks, and resolutions to client stakeholders with clarity, timeliness, and professionalism — managing expectations proactively and never leaving the client to chase for updates.
• Translate complex technical issues into clear, business-impact-oriented language for non-technical client stakeholders, and provide appropriately deep technical detail for the client's senior engineers.
• Lead daily operational standup calls with client stakeholders — covering overnight incident activity, open tickets, change pipeline, and upcoming risks.
• Identify and proactively flag risks to service quality before they become client-impacting issues — presenting remediation options, not just problems.
• Act as the internal voice of the client — ensuring the offshore team and internal delivery leadership understand client priorities, sensitivities, and expectations at all times.

Governance, Reporting & Service Management

• Own the creation and delivery of governance reporting — weekly operational reports, monthly service review packs, SLA/KPI scorecards, incident trend analysis, and capacity and availability summaries — leveraging offshore team data and inputs but taking personal accountability for quality and accuracy.
• Lead and facilitate weekly and monthly governance calls with client stakeholders — presenting service performance, open risks, improvement initiatives, and forward-looking operational plans with confidence and data-driven storytelling.
• Maintain rigorous ITSM process adherence across the engagement — incident management, problem management, change management, and service request fulfilment — ensuring the offshore team follows defined processes consistently and that ITSM data quality (ServiceNow or equivalent) is maintained.
• Own the Problem Management process — tracking recurring incidents to root cause, managing the problem backlog, and driving permanent fixes through to closure.
• Manage the change management pipeline — reviewing, approving, and scheduling changes proposed by the offshore team, assessing risk, ensuring change documentation is complete, and representing changes to the client CAB (Change Advisory Board) where required.
• Track and report on SLA and OLA performance — identifying at-risk SLAs early and driving corrective action before breach.

 

AWS Architecture & Continuous Improvement

• Conduct periodic Well-Architected Reviews of the client's AWS environment, identifying reliability, security, performance, cost optimisation, and operational excellence improvements.
• Develop and present architectural improvement proposals to the client — prioritised, business-case-backed recommendations for remediation of technical debt, reliability enhancements, and cost reduction opportunities.
• Lead observability and monitoring improvements — ensuring the client environment has appropriate CloudWatch dashboards, alarms, log insights queries, and alerting coverage, and driving gaps to closure with the offshore team.
• Drive automation and toil reduction initiatives — identifying manual operational tasks performed by the offshore team and designing automation solutions (Lambda, Systems Manager Automation, EventBridge) to eliminate them.
• Oversee cost optimisation for the client's AWS environment — including rightsizing recommendations, Reserved Instance and Savings Plans strategy, S3 storage class optimisation, and elimination of unused resources — presenting findings and tracking savings realised.
• Stay current with AWS service releases and best practices, proactively identifying new services or features that could improve the client's environment and presenting them as value-add recommendations.

 

Required Qualifications

Certifications

• AWS Solutions Architect – Associate — minimum requirement.
• AWS Solutions Architect – Professional strongly preferred.
• AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional or AWS SysOps Administrator advantageous.

Experience

• 12+ years of overall experience in cloud infrastructure, AWS operations, or enterprise IT.
• 5+ years of hands-on AWS architecture and operations experience — designing, deploying, and operating production AWS environments at scale, not just advisory or oversight roles.
• 3+ years in a managed services or cloud operations environment — with direct experience managing SLAs, running ITSM processes, and operating in a 24x7 support model.
• Proven experience as a technical escalation lead (L3 equivalent) — personally resolving complex AWS infrastructure incidents, performing RCA, and driving permanent remediation.
• Demonstrated experience leading and managing offshore delivery teams — setting direction, reviewing deliverables, managing shift operations, and driving quality in a distributed India-based team model.
• Proven track record of client-facing technical leadership — managing daily stakeholder relationships, leading governance calls, and communicating operational performance to senior client stakeholders.
• Must be based in New Jersey and willing to work from the client office 3 days per week.

Technical Depth — AWS (Hands-On Required)

Candidates must have hands-on operational depth across the following — not just architectural knowledge:

• Compute: EC2 (instance types, placement groups, auto scaling, launch templates), EKS, ECS, Lambda
• Networking: VPC design and troubleshooting, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPN, Route53, CloudFront, ELB/ALB/NLB
• Storage: S3 (policies, lifecycle, replication, performance), EBS (volume types, performance tuning), EFS, FSx
• Databases: RDS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle), Aurora (provisioned and Serverless), DynamoDB, ElastiCache
• Security: IAM (policies, roles, permission boundaries, SCPs), Security Hub, GuardDuty, CloudTrail, AWS Config, KMS, Secrets Manager, WAF
• Observability: CloudWatch (metrics, logs, alarms, dashboards, Contributor Insights), AWS X-Ray, CloudTrail log analysis
• DevOps & Automation: CloudFormation, Terraform, Systems Manager (Automation, Patch Manager, Session Manager), Lambda for operational automation, EventBridge
• Cost Management: Cost Explorer, Budgets, Trusted Advisor, Compute Optimizer, rightsizing analysis

Skills

• Exceptional troubleshooting skills — ability to diagnose complex, multi-layered AWS infrastructure issues under pressure with limited information, in real time during active incidents.
• Strong written and verbal communication — able to produce client-ready RCA documents, governance reports, and architecture proposals, and present them confidently to technical and executive audiences.
• Deep understanding of ITSM frameworks (ITIL V3/V4 preferred) and practical experience running incident, problem, change, and service request management processes.
• Strong offshore team management instincts — experience setting clear expectations, providing structured feedback, and improving team quality in a distributed, shift-based delivery model.
• Ability to operate effectively under pressure — remaining calm, structured, and client-focused during P1 incidents and escalation situations.

 

Preferred Qualifications

• ITIL V3 or V4 Foundation certification.
• Experience with ServiceNow or equivalent ITSM platforms — ticket management, SLA configuration, reporting, and dashboard creation.
• Multi-cloud awareness — working knowledge of Azure or GCP in addition to AWS.
• Experience with observability platforms — Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk — in addition to native CloudWatch.
• Familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud cost governance in a managed services context.
• Experience with AWS Landing Zone / Control Tower and multi-account AWS environments.
• Prior experience in technology consulting, systems integration, or IT outsourcing organisations managing external client engagements.
• PMP or equivalent programme/project management certification.

 

 

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Thanks & Regards Uma Adhikari Sr. Technical Recruiter E-Solutions E: um...@E-solutionsinc.com  W: www.e-solutionsinc.com Offices in 35 countries with a global workforce in 150 countries   Disclaimer: E-Solutions provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation,gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, amnesty, or status as a covered veteran in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws. We especially invite women, minorities, veterans, and individuals with disabilities to apply.EEO/AA/M/F/Vet/Disability.