Peraton is seeking a Cloud Engineer specializing in Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to help modernize how it manages audit, risk, and compliance. This person will help move from manual evidence collection to a cloud-engineered, continuously monitored program. This senior role owns the transformation end-to-end: the audit and assessment calendar, System Security Plan and control documentation, continuity and privacy deliverables, and compliance reporting, all rebuilt on automated pipelines this role designs and builds directly.
Work Location: Remote
Shift Schedule: 8am – 5pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)
What you will do:
Audit & Assessment Leadership
- Own the organization's full audit and assessment calendar, ongoing/continuous control assessments, financial and IT-financial audits, internal controls testing, and security compliance audits (e.g., SOC 1 Type II). Serving as the primary point of contact for external auditors and assessors.
- Lead recurring meetings and working sessions with the client, auditors, and assessors across the audit lifecycle: kickoffs, evidence walkthroughs, interviews, findings reviews, and status updates. Represents the organization’s control environment directly to external stakeholders.
- Provide audit support across the full assessment portfolio, including penetration testing, red/purple/white team exercises, and periodic CISA high-value-asset assessments, incorporating all findings into the risk register and remediation lifecycle.
- Support new system authorization (ATO) and periodic reauthorization efforts, coordinating required documentation and evidence on a recurring cycle.
Security Documentation & Control Ownership
- Own ongoing maintenance of the System Security Plan (SSP): control implementation updates, system and technical descriptions, and review of inherited/tailored controls against the NIST 800-53 baseline. Validating control descriptions against the actual cloud architecture and configuration, not just the paper record.
- Lead the annual review and executive sign-off cycle for core security documentation and review the organization's control catalog for accuracy against how the environment is built and configured.
Continuity & Resilience Planning
- Own the annual review, update, and test cycle for business continuity and resilience documentation: business impact analysis, contingency plans, disaster recovery plans, and incident response plans. Grounded in the actual failover, backup, and recovery architecture of the cloud environment, not generic templates.
Privacy
- Lead recurring privacy impact/threshold assessments in coordination with the privacy function, including technical review of how architecture handles the data in scope.
Metrics, Reporting & Automation
- Own recurring compliance reporting deliverables: inventory reports, compliance scorecards, SLA and audit-performance metrics, progress reports, and build the automation that generates them directly from the cloud environment (native services, APIs, infrastructure-as-code state) rather than manual collection.
- Design, build, and maintain automated evidence-collection and continuous-monitoring pipelines using native cloud services and scripting/IaC, reducing manual, screenshot-based collection across the full audit and reporting calendar above.
- Identify the highest-value recurring manual processes across audit, documentation, and reporting work, and personally build the automation to address them. This role is expected to build, not just spec and hand off.
Governance & Stakeholder Coordination
- Maintain governance documents that codify the organization's security and audit-support processes.
- Serve as the point of contact for ad hoc security and privacy inquiries and impact-analysis requests from system and business owners.
- Lead recurring coordination meetings with system owners, risk management, and compliance stakeholders to maintain shared visibility into audit status, findings, and remediation.
Skills:
- Infrastructure depth. Hands-on experience with the organization's full technical environment: cloud (AWS), networking, databases, and midrange software (OS, VDI, Security, and administrative tool stack. Focus is to build in and extract evidence.
- Infrastructure as Code. Able to read, write, and modify IaC (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) to validate infrastructure configurations, and to build policy as code compliance checks into the pipeline.
- Automation & scripting. Builds working automation (in any language — Python, Bash, PowerShell) for evidence collection, inventory reporting, and continuous monitoring; this is a hands-on build responsibility across this role's full reporting and audit workload, not an occasional task.
- Security tooling & automation. Able to pull compliance-relevant data and build automated evidence collection from the organization’s security tool stack (e.g., SIEM, firewalls, EDR, centralized logging), not limited to cloud-native services. Capable of managing Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (Wiz, Prisma Cloud) for enterprise “code to runtime” security with automated remediation.
- Networking fundamentals. Understands network architecture, segmentation, and access boundaries to assess whether a control claim about network security is true in the environment. Including cloud platform's native compliance, logging, and monitoring services (e.g., AWS Config, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Audit Manager) as the primary evidence source, replacing manual collection.
- GRC platform fluency. Administers and configure GRC/compliance automation tooling to consume evidence pulled from the cloud environment.
- NIST 800-53 and control framework depth. Experience with control intent (not just control language) to tailor, inherit, and validate controls against real architecture.
- Written and verbal communication. Translates technical implementation into audit-ready narrative for auditors and translates compliance/control requirements into terms that hold up in architecture and code.
- Program and stakeholder management. Runs the full audit, documentation, and reporting calendar, with organizational discipline.
