Cloud Security Engineer (Contract)

About the position

Magpie Literacy is an early stage, funded edtech nonprofit on a mission to eradicate illiteracy in America. Our team is composed of former educators, literacy curriculum experts, and product developers who believe it is possible to teach every child to read, and to do so at scale via research-based instruction, personalization, and technology. We center students in all decisions. We’re building an integrated, comprehensive, tech-enabled pre-kindergarten through 8th grade reading product that students love and that rapidly moves them to foundational literacy and reading fluency. We’re looking for a Cloud Security Engineer (Contract) to support our growing platform and security needs. This role will be crucial in helping us maintain secure and auditable infrastructure across our AWS environments. If you’re passionate about infrastructure security, compliance, and automation—and you’re fluent in AWS and Terraform—we’d love to connect. This is an opportunity to join a mission-driven organization from the ground floor, working to build a breakthrough reading solution for historically underserved students.

Responsibilities

• Respond to vulnerabilities across our platform and support CI security efforts
• Collaborate with engineers to ensure remediation efforts are properly tracked and executed
• Drive improvements in our detection and alerting capabilities
• Help implement Compliance as Code strategies to automate and prove security best practices
• Support ongoing audit efforts by helping us track and document routes, access, and activities across the platform
• Coordinate with engineers to perform scans and remediations
• Implement comprehensive logging and audit trails (access logs, system logs, application logs, etc.)

Requirements

• Has strong experience with AWS cloud infrastructure and Terraform
• Understands modern cloud security practices and threat modeling
• Has familiarity with CI/CD security
• Can translate compliance requirements into actionable engineering work
• Is organized and great at collaborating with both internal and external teams

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with Compliance as Code tools (e.g., Open Policy Agent, InSpec, or similar)
• Prior experience working in startups or fast-paced environments

Benefits

• Hourly Rate $100-$125/hr
• Remote first team
• Opportunity to work with a mission-driven company full of change-makers