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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for AWS Cloud Engineer

💰 $90,000 - $160,000

Cloud EngineeringAWSDevOpsSite Reliability

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an AWS Cloud Engineer to design, build, secure, and operate scalable production systems on AWS. This hands-on role partners with development, security and operations teams to implement Infrastructure as Code, automate CI/CD pipelines, optimize cloud costs, and ensure high availability and resilience. The ideal candidate has deep experience with core AWS services (VPC, EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, EKS), IaC tools like Terraform or CloudFormation, strong Linux and scripting skills, and proven operational experience running distributed systems in production.

This role is optimized for cloud-native application architectures, containerized workloads, and hybrid/multi-account enterprise environments. The AWS Cloud Engineer will be responsible for platform reliability, observability, security posture, cost efficiency, and continuous delivery best practices.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Cloud Engineer / Cloud Operations Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer or Build/Release Engineer
  • Systems Administrator / Linux Engineer transitioning to cloud

Advancement To:

  • Senior AWS Cloud Engineer / Lead Cloud Engineer
  • Cloud Architect / Solutions Architect (AWS)
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead / Platform Engineering Manager
  • Principal Cloud Engineer / Director of Cloud Platforms

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Platform Engineer
  • Cloud Security Engineer / DevSecOps Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain secure, highly available, and cost-effective AWS infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, AWS CloudFormation) to provision VPCs, subnets, route tables, NAT gateways, security groups, and network ACLs across multiple accounts and regions.
  • Build, own and operate CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, AWS CodePipeline) to automate application and infrastructure deployments, implementing blue/green and canary release strategies, automated rollback, and deployment gating.
  • Migrate legacy on-premises workloads to AWS through lift-and-shift and re-architecting efforts, including assessment, execution, and post-migration validation using AWS Migration Hub, DMS, and Server Migration Service.
  • Architect, deploy and manage container platforms (Amazon EKS, ECS, Fargate) and support Kubernetes operations: cluster provisioning, autoscaling, node lifecycle, Helm charts, service mesh, and deployment strategies.
  • Implement serverless architectures with AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, and EventBridge to accelerate feature delivery and reduce operational overhead for event-driven workloads.
  • Implement and enforce centralized identity and access management (AWS IAM, AWS Organizations, Service Control Policies) and RBAC models, including cross-account roles, least-privilege policies, and granular permission controls.
  • Design and operate secure network topologies including VPC peering, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPN, private endpoints, and Route 53 DNS configurations to provide secure, low-latency connectivity between services.
  • Implement encryption-in-transit and at-rest strategies using AWS KMS, S3 encryption, RDS encryption, and client-side encryption, ensuring compliance with data protection requirements and corporate policies.
  • Build observability and monitoring frameworks using Amazon CloudWatch, CloudTrail, AWS X-Ray, Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK/Opensearch stacks to provide metrics, distributed tracing, centralized logging, alerting, and capacity planning.
  • Develop automated incident response, runbooks, alerting thresholds, and post-incident reviews; participate in on-call rotations and reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR) for production incidents.
  • Optimize cloud cost and resource utilization using AWS Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, rightsizing recommendations, reserved instances/savings plans, and automated lifecycle policies for storage and compute resources.
  • Implement backup, snapshot, retention and disaster recovery strategies for databases, block storage, and object storage using AWS Backup, RDS automated backups, and cross-region replication.
  • Harden AWS accounts and workloads using security best practices: AWS Config rules, GuardDuty, Security Hub, VPC flow logs, CloudTrail log aggregation, and automated remediation workflows with AWS Systems Manager or Lambda.
  • Author and maintain infrastructure and platform documentation, architecture diagrams, runbooks, and deployment guides to ensure reproducibility and knowledge transfer across teams.
  • Collaborate with application developers to design observable, resilient cloud-native services; provide code and architecture reviews focused on scalability, fault tolerance, and performance.
  • Create and maintain automated configuration management and bootstrapping scripts (Ansible, Chef, or cloud-init) for consistent instance builds and immutable infrastructure patterns.
  • Manage relational and NoSQL database services (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache) including provisioning, backups, performance tuning, indexing strategies, and scaling plans to meet SLAs.
  • Integrate security scanning, container image signing, and vulnerability management into the CI/CD pipeline using tools like Clair, Trivy, Snyk, or AWS ECR image scanning.
  • Implement multi-account AWS strategies and governance using AWS Organizations, SCPs, consolidated billing, tagging standards, and account vending/provisioning automation.
  • Drive platform improvements with automation: autoscaling policies, lifecycle hooks, self-healing mechanisms, and infrastructure automation to reduce manual toil and improve deployment velocity.
  • Evaluate and integrate managed AWS services (AWS Managed Services, AWS RDS Proxy, SSM, Secrets Manager) to reduce operational burden and improve security posture.
  • Conduct performance testing, capacity planning, and tuning for compute, storage and database layers to meet latency and throughput objectives under expected load patterns.
  • Lead proof-of-concepts and evaluate third-party cloud tools and services (CICD, observability, security) to improve platform capabilities and developer experience.
  • Mentor junior cloud engineers, provide training on AWS best practices, and promote a culture of automation, security-first design, and continuous improvement.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist with procurement and vendor evaluations for cloud tooling and managed services, providing technical requirements and TCO analysis.
  • Participate in compliance and audit activities, providing evidence for controls, change management, and security policies across AWS environments.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience with core AWS services: EC2, S3, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, Lambda, VPC, Route 53, EKS, ECS, Fargate, API Gateway.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Proven production experience with Terraform (preferred) and/or AWS CloudFormation, including modules, state management, and CI integration.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Kubernetes administration (EKS), Docker, Helm, and cluster lifecycle management.
  • CI/CD and automation: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, AWS CodePipeline, and experience automating pipeline-driven deployments and rollbacks.
  • Networking: Deep understanding of VPC design, subnetting, NAT, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, VPN, load balancing (ALB/NLB) and DNS (Route 53).
  • Security & Identity: IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, AWS Organizations, Security Hub, GuardDuty, CloudTrail, and applying least-privilege principles.
  • Monitoring & Observability: CloudWatch metrics/logs/alarms, X-Ray, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch, and distributed tracing approaches.
  • Scripting & Automation: Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or PowerShell for automation, tooling and operational tasks.
  • Databases & Storage: Administer and tune RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache; manage S3 lifecycle policies and cross-region replication.
  • Cost Management & Optimization: AWS Cost Explorer, budgets, savings plans, and automated cost governance patterns.
  • Backup & Disaster Recovery: Design and implement backup, snapshots, cross-region replication and recovery playbooks.
  • Configuration Management: Experience with Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or similar for system configuration and orchestration.
  • Logging & SIEM Integration: Centralized logging pipelines, log retention policies, and forwarding to SIEMs or log analytics platforms.
  • Container Security & Image Scanning: Familiar with vulnerability scanning, image signing and runtime security controls.
  • Terraform state management and remote backends (S3/DynamoDB), handling drift, and CI-driven IaC validation.

(These hard skills are pulled from current AWS Cloud Engineer job openings, aligned with enterprise and startup expectations.)

Soft Skills

  • Strong verbal and written communication for cross-functional collaboration and documentation.
  • Problem-solving mindset: root-cause analysis, post-incident analysis and continuous improvement.
  • Collaboration and stakeholder management: able to work with product, security, QA and platform teams to prioritize work.
  • Time management and prioritization in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
  • Mentorship and knowledge sharing: coach junior engineers and create onboarding materials.
  • Proactive ownership and accountability for production reliability and operational excellence.
  • Adaptability to change and learning new AWS services, tools and best practices quickly.
  • Attention to detail for compliance, security controls, and high-quality runbooks.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent hands-on experience in cloud/IT operations.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in related technical discipline plus relevant certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator).
  • Professional certificates: AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate/Professional), AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Terraform Associate.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Network Engineering
  • Cloud Computing / Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–8+ years of professional experience in cloud engineering, systems administration or DevOps roles, with a minimum of 2–3 years focused on AWS in production.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of cloud and infrastructure experience with demonstrable projects: multi-account AWS environments, production Kubernetes/EKS clusters, IaC-driven provisioning, and CI/CD pipeline automation.
  • Experience in regulated industries (FIN/Healthcare/Government) or large enterprise cloud migrations and working with compliance frameworks (SOC2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA).
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