Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for AWS Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

As an AWS Engineer, you will lead the design, deployment, and operational excellence of cloud-native infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. You will be responsible for building automated, resilient, and secure environments using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation), improving CI/CD pipelines, and collaborating with developers, security, and product teams to deliver scalable, cost-effective solutions. The role requires strong expertise across AWS core services (EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, IAM), serverless patterns (Lambda), container orchestration (EKS), networking, infrastructure automation, monitoring and incident response.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Cloud Support Engineer
DevOps Engineer
Systems Administrator

Advancement To:

Senior AWS Engineer / Cloud Architect
DevOps / Platform Engineering Lead
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager
Cloud Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

Cloud Security Engineer
Kubernetes/EKS Platform Engineer
Automation / CI-CD Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Design and implement secure, highly available, and cost-efficient AWS architectures leveraging EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, VPC, and IAM to meet business and scalability requirements while following best practices for reliability and security.
Build, maintain, and improve Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and CloudFormation to provision AWS resources reproducibly, including module design, state management, and pipeline integration.
Develop and manage automated CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline) for application and infrastructure deployments, ensuring repeatability, testing, and rollback capabilities.
Lead migration planning and execution for on-premises and legacy applications to AWS, creating lift-and-shift and re-architecture strategies that minimize downtime and reduce operational risk.
Design and operate containerized platforms using Docker and Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), including cluster provisioning, autoscaling, networking, and integration with service meshes and ingress controllers.
Implement serverless solutions using AWS Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway, and managed event-driven architectures to deliver scalable microservices and reduce operational overhead.
Architect and enforce secure network topologies with VPC design, subnets, route tables, NAT gateways, VPC endpoints, transit gateways, and VPN/Direct Connect configurations for hybrid connectivity.
Define and implement robust IAM policies, roles, least-privilege access controls, and AWS Organizations service control policies to secure accounts and protect sensitive data.
Establish observability and monitoring strategies using CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch, and X-Ray to track system health, alert on anomalies, and support proactive incident response.
Conduct performance tuning and capacity planning for compute, storage, and database services (RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB) to optimize latency and throughput for production workloads.
Automate repetitive operational tasks and runbooks using scripting (Python, Bash) and orchestration tools to reduce toil, improve mean time to recovery, and support 24/7 operations.
Implement backup, snapshot, and disaster recovery strategies including cross-region replication, RDS automated backups, S3 lifecycle policies, and runbook-driven recovery testing.
Drive cost optimization initiatives across accounts and services—rightsizing instances, implementing reserved/spot instance strategies, S3 storage class management, and financial tagging/reporting.
Integrate security scanning, static analysis, and vulnerability management into pipelines and runtime environments; collaborate with security teams to remediate issues and perform threat modeling.
Maintain and evolve multi-account AWS environments using AWS Organizations, SCPs, centralized logging, and account baseline templates to enforce governance and compliance.
Design and implement data transfer and integration patterns (S3, Kinesis, SNS, SQS, DataSync) to reliably move and process data between services and systems at scale.
Perform root cause analysis and lead post-incident reviews for production outages, document remediation plans, and implement preventative controls to improve system resiliency.
Collaborate closely with development teams to define platform capabilities, create self-service patterns, and provide developer enablement through reusable modules and documentation.
Own and improve deployment pipelines, blue/green and canary deployment strategies, feature flag integration, and rollback procedures to minimize customer impact during releases.
Evaluate new AWS services, open-source tools, and third-party solutions; create migration/POC plans and pilot initiatives that accelerate engineering velocity and reduce technical debt.
Manage secrets, certificate lifecycle, and encryption strategies using AWS KMS, Secrets Manager, Parameter Store, and TLS best practices to protect sensitive credentials and data.
Implement logging, audit trails and compliance reporting (CloudTrail, Config) to meet regulatory requirements, internal policies, and to streamline security audits.
Mentor junior engineers, run knowledge-sharing sessions, and write clear runbooks/documentation to grow team capabilities and institutionalize operational excellence.
Participate in capacity planning and roadmap discussions, estimating effort for cloud initiatives and providing input on platform SLAs, SLOs, and operational metrics.

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 support rotations and troubleshoot escalations for production incidents.
Assist procurement and vendor evaluation for cloud-related tools and managed services.
Contribute to internal knowledge bases, runbooks, and architecture decision records (ADRs).
Assist with capacity planning and budgeting exercises for cloud spend forecasts.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Deep experience with AWS core services: EC2, S3, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudTrail.
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (preferred) and/or AWS CloudFormation with modular, testable templates and state management.
Container orchestration and tooling: Docker, Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), Helm, kube-proxy, and related networking.
Serverless architectures: AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, and serverless deployment frameworks.
CI/CD and automation: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, Spinnaker, or comparable tooling.
Configuration management and automation: Ansible, Chef, or similar tools for bootstrapping and configuration.
Scripting and programming: Python, Bash, and familiarity with SDKs (boto3) for automation and integrations.
Networking and security: VPC design, subnetting, routing, VPN/Direct Connect, security groups, NACLs, TLS, and IAM policy design.
Observability and monitoring: CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch, X-Ray, and log aggregation pipelines.
Database and storage management: RDS/Aurora administration, DynamoDB design patterns, S3 lifecycle/policy management.
Identity, secrets, and key management: AWS IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, Parameter Store.
Cost management and optimization: AWS cost explorer, tagging strategies, Reserved/Spot instance management.
Migration experience: lift-and-shift, re-platforming, and refactor efforts to AWS at enterprise scale.
Compliance and governance: AWS Organizations, Service Control Policies (SCPs), CloudTrail, AWS Config setup for auditability.
Familiarity with service meshes, ingress controllers, and advanced load balancing (ALB/NLB) is a plus.

Soft Skills

Strong communication skills to translate technical concepts for stakeholders and participate in cross-functional discussions.
Proven problem-solving mindset with the ability to perform root cause analysis and implement actionable remediation.
Collaboration and mentorship orientation: ability to coach junior engineers and work in cross-functional product teams.
Effective time management and prioritization in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
Proactive attitude toward automation, continuous improvement, and technical debt reduction.
Customer-focused mindset with empathy for downstream engineers and end-users.
High attention to detail when writing infrastructure code, runbooks, and operational documentation.
Resilience under pressure during production incidents and the ability to conduct blameless postmortems.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related technical field OR equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in Computer Science or Cloud Computing, or relevant industry certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Terraform Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Information Technology
Software Engineering
Systems Engineering
Network Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years of hands-on experience designing and operating AWS infrastructure, with progressive responsibilities in cloud architecture, automation, and production reliability.

Preferred: 5+ years of cloud engineering experience, demonstrable experience owning production services at scale on AWS, proven delivery of migrations and platform initiatives, and relevant cloud certifications (AWS Solutions Architect, AWS DevOps Engineer, HashiCorp Terraform Associate).