Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for AWS DevOps Engineer

💰 $ - $

CloudDevOpsAWSEngineering

🎯 Role Definition

The AWS DevOps Engineer is a hands-on cloud and automation specialist responsible for designing, implementing, and operating highly available, secure, and cost-efficient infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines on AWS. This role combines software engineering, systems administration, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), observability, and operational best practices (SRE/DevOps) to accelerate delivery, improve reliability, and reduce operational risk. The ideal candidate partners with development teams to automate build, test, deployment, monitoring and recovery workflows across services such as EC2, EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudFormation, Terraform and AWS CDK.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Cloud Engineer or Cloud Systems Administrator transitioning into automation-first responsibilities
  • Site Reliability Engineer or Release Engineer moving from operations-focused to full DevOps discipline
  • Software Engineer with experience in CI/CD, scripting and cloud-native services

Advancement To:

  • Senior AWS DevOps Engineer or Principal DevOps Engineer
  • Cloud/Infrastructure Architect designing multi-account, multi-region AWS platforms
  • Head of Platform Engineering or SRE Lead responsible for platform roadmap and team leadership

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineer (Kubernetes/EKS-focused)
  • Cloud Security Engineer or DevSecOps Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect, build and maintain production-grade AWS environments using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK) to ensure repeatable, auditable, and secure deployments across multiple accounts and regions.
  • Design and implement automated CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, AWS CodePipeline) that enable frequent, safe, and observable application releases for microservices and serverless workloads.
  • Operate and harden container orchestration platforms (EKS or self-managed Kubernetes), including cluster provisioning, node lifecycle, networking (CNI), RBAC, and rollout strategies for zero-downtime deployments.
  • Create and maintain serverless application deployments (Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions) with automated packaging, versioning, and observability for event-driven architectures.
  • Implement robust logging, monitoring and alerting solutions (CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch) to provide actionable SLO/SLI-based observability and rapid incident detection and response.
  • Lead fault-tolerant infrastructure design and runbooks for high-availability systems; own incident management, post-incident reviews, RCA and remediation to continually improve reliability.
  • Automate provisioning, configuration management, and system hardening using tools such as Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, and integrate configuration drift detection into pipelines.
  • Manage secrets and credential lifecycle using AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, or HashiCorp Vault and implement least-privilege IAM policies and role separation.
  • Drive cost optimization and capacity planning across AWS accounts by implementing cost-aware architecture patterns, reservation strategies, and automated scaling policies.
  • Build, maintain and secure multi-account, multi-region AWS architectures using AWS Organizations, Service Control Policies (SCPs), consolidated billing, and account baseline automation.
  • Implement GitOps methodologies and branching strategies to enable declarative infrastructure deployments and immutable artifacts, using tools like Argo CD or Flux.
  • Develop infrastructure test suites (unit, integration, and end-to-end) and CI pipeline gates — policy-as-code (OPA), security scanning (Snyk, Trivy), and compliance checks to shift-left quality and security.
  • Mentor engineers on cloud-native best practices, automation patterns, and operational readiness; provide onboarding documentation and runbooks for new services.
  • Collaborate with product and development teams to translate feature requirements into robust deployment architectures, SLAs, and performance budgets.
  • Integrate security and compliance controls into the DevOps lifecycle (IaC scanning, container image signing, vulnerability management, and automated patching workflows).
  • Build blue/green and canary deployment strategies and implement traffic shifting with API Gateway, ALB, or service meshes to minimize deployment risk.
  • Manage backup, disaster recovery, and data retention strategies for infrastructure and platform components; test recovery procedures and RTO/RPO objectives regularly.
  • Implement network design and security patterns (VPC, subnets, NACLs, security groups, Transit Gateway, VPC Endpoints) to ensure private, performant, and secure service communication.
  • Create and maintain developer platform tooling (CLI utilities, SDKs, templates, and self-service portals) to reduce cognitive load and speed developer onboarding.
  • Troubleshoot complex production issues across application, platform, network, and AWS service layers; use distributed tracing (X-Ray, Jaeger) and profiling to root-cause performance bottlenecks.
  • Maintain and improve deployment documentation, runbooks, and playbooks in collaboration with operations and security to ensure reproducible, standardized operational procedures.
  • Evaluate new AWS services and third-party tools; propose and prototype solutions that improve delivery velocity, reliability, or security posture.
  • Enforce and contribute to DevOps engineering standards, architecture reviews, and technical governance to maintain consistency across teams and environments.
  • Own lifecycle management for build agents, runners and platform services; perform upgrades, capacity adjustments and security patching with minimal disruption.

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.
  • Provide on-call rotation support for platform incidents and contribute to continuous improvement of on-call tooling and procedures.
  • Coordinate with security, compliance, and risk teams on audits, evidence collection and remediation efforts for cloud controls.
  • Drive documentation, training sessions and cross-functional workshops to increase cloud fluency and DevOps adoption across the organization.
  • Assist in vendor evaluation and management for cloud tooling (monitoring, CI/CD, IaC scanning, secrets management).

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • AWS Core Services: deep practical experience with EC2, S3, VPC, IAM, RDS, ELB/ALB, Route 53, CloudFront, and AWS Organizations.
  • Infrastructure as Code: strong proficiency with Terraform and/or CloudFormation and/or AWS CDK to design modular, reusable infrastructure modules.
  • CI/CD & Release Engineering: hands-on experience building and managing pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or AWS CodePipeline and integrating automated testing and gating.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: production experience with Docker and Kubernetes (EKS), including Helm charts, operators, and cluster lifecycle management.
  • Scripting & Automation: advanced scripting skills in Python, Bash, or Go to automate workflows, CLI tools, and operational tasks.
  • Observability & Monitoring: implement and operate logging, metrics, tracing stacks (CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch, X-Ray).
  • Security & Compliance: experience with IAM, encryption (KMS), secrets management (Vault, Secrets Manager), vulnerability scanning and remediation processes.
  • Configuration Management: familiarity with Ansible, Chef or Puppet for infrastructure configuration and application provisioning.
  • Networking & Connectivity: strong understanding of VPC design, subnetting, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect/VPN and network security controls.
  • Cost Management & Optimization: use of AWS Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, rightsizing, and auto-scaling strategies to manage cloud spend.
  • GitOps & Policy-as-Code: experience with GitOps tools (Argo CD, Flux) and policy-as-code (OPA/Rego, Sentinel) for governance and compliance.
  • Serverless Technologies: design and operate Lambda-based applications and event-driven architectures with monitoring and CI/CD integration.
  • Databases & Storage: knowledge of RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache and S3 lifecycle management and backup strategies.

Soft Skills

  • Strong communication skills: translate complex technical concepts into business-impacting language for stakeholders and engineering peers.
  • Collaboration & empathy: work cross-functionally with developers, QA, security and product teams to deliver shared goals.
  • Problem-solving and troubleshooting mindset: systematic, evidence-driven approach to incident response and root cause analysis.
  • Ownership and accountability: drive initiatives end-to-end, from proposal through implementation to operational handover.
  • Continuous learning and curiosity: stay current with AWS feature releases, cloud-native patterns and DevOps best practices.
  • Prioritization and time management: balance reliability, velocity and technical debt in a fast-paced environment.
  • Coaching and mentorship: guide junior engineers and promote best practices across the organization.
  • Adaptability and resilience: handle on-call pressure and shifting priorities while maintaining focus on long-term platform stability.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience combined with relevant certifications.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in a technical field or related certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years of professional experience in cloud engineering, site reliability, systems engineering or DevOps, with at least 2+ years focused on AWS production environments.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years implementing and operating cloud infrastructure with demonstrable experience designing CI/CD pipelines, IaC, container orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS), and production monitoring/alerting.
  • Proven track record of driving automation, reducing lead time for changes, and improving system reliability and cost-efficiency in AWS.
  • Experience working in Agile or DevOps organizations, participating in on-call rotations, incident response, and cross-functional delivery.
Explore More Careers