Someone straight out of college is going to be making close to $50k. $170k would be a very senior person to come in at the top level. I can't imagine building a cloud platform at the government. What type of hardware is the procurement department going to get with the bidding process? You'll also won't able to get unix machine or macs to run as your development machines, it will be windows boxes filled with spyware. I say this as my dad worked as a senior scientist creating software / models to track oil spills and toxic chemical spills. On his last year before retirement, they banned his team from using Macs.