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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Automation Engineer

💰 $110,000 - $170,000

CloudDevOpsAutomationSREPlatform Engineering

🎯 Role Definition

The Cloud Automation Engineer designs, builds, and operates automated cloud infrastructure and delivery pipelines that enable teams to deploy and run scalable, secure, and cost-efficient systems. This role bridges cloud engineering, platform automation, and site reliability practices: you will author infrastructure-as-code, develop CI/CD and GitOps workflows, automate repeatable operational tasks, and instrument systems for observability and cost control. The ideal candidate has practical experience across public cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP), IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation), configuration management (Ansible, Chef), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and scripting (Python, Go, Bash).

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • DevOps Engineer with 2+ years of cloud automation experience
  • Cloud Engineer or Systems Administrator transitioning to IaC-driven workflows
  • Platform Engineer or SRE with automation and scripting background

Advancement To:

  • Senior Cloud Automation Engineer / Lead Cloud Automation Engineer
  • Cloud Architect or Platform Architect (multi-cloud solutions)
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead or Head of Platform Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineer (self-service platform and developer tools)
  • Site Reliability Engineer (focus on reliability and incident response)
  • Security Automation Engineer (shift-left security and compliance automation)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain scalable infrastructure-as-code (IaC) modules and repositories using Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to provision VPCs, networking, compute, managed Kubernetes, and managed database services across one or more cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • Build and operate end-to-end CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps) that automate build, test, security scanning, and deployment workflows for microservices, infrastructure changes, and configuration drift remediation.
  • Author reusable Terraform modules and enforce best practices (state management, remote backends, workspaces, locking) to enable cross-team provisioning and team-level self-service infrastructure.
  • Develop and maintain GitOps patterns and controllers (Argo CD, Flux) to declaratively manage Kubernetes cluster workloads, promote changes across environments, and enable auditability and easy rollbacks.
  • Automate configuration and server lifecycle tasks using tools such as Ansible, Chef, or SaltStack, including patching, bootstrap, package installation, and configuration enforcement across cloud instances and containers.
  • Containerize services and build automated container pipelines, including Docker image hardening, scanning, registry management, and automated promotion across environments.
  • Design, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE or self-managed) with production-grade cluster architecture: node scaling, pod scheduling, network policies, RBAC, resource quotas, and multi-tenant considerations.
  • Implement service meshes, ingress controllers, and API gateways (Istio, Linkerd, NGINX, Kong) to standardize traffic management, observability, and security for distributed services.
  • Instrument systems with logging, metrics, and tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Loki, Jaeger) and create alerting/observability automation that reduces mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to recovery (MTTR).
  • Establish automated security and compliance tooling in pipelines (Snyk, Trivy, Clair, Checkov, tfsec) to detect vulnerabilities, IaC misconfigurations, and drift before changes reach production.
  • Implement cost management and governance automation (tagging enforcement, budget alerts, autoscaling rules, rightsizing scripts) to optimize cloud spend and forecast usage.
  • Build automated blue/green or canary deployment strategies and rollout orchestration to minimize risk and enable safe progressive deployments.
  • Create and maintain platform-level self-service APIs, CLIs, and developer on-boarding automation to accelerate product delivery and reduce cognitive load for application teams.
  • Integrate identity and access management automation for cloud resources (IAM, RBAC, OIDC) and streamline least-privilege access using automated role provisioning and ephemeral credentials.
  • Manage secrets and credentials lifecycle with automated secret rotation and integration to secrets stores (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault) and pipeline secret handling best practices.
  • Implement backup, DR, and recovery automation for critical data and services, including infrastructure snapshots, cross-region replication, and runbook-driven restore automation.
  • Participate in design reviews and architecture decisions, contributing automation considerations, scalability patterns, and cost-performance trade-offs for new services.
  • Develop and maintain operational runbooks, automated remediation playbooks (Lambda, Cloud Functions, or automation runbooks), and incident response automation to reduce toil and manual intervention.
  • Collaborate with security, QA, and product teams to assess platform changes for risk and operational impact, and to integrate shift-left testing and policy-as-code enforcement into development workflows.
  • Lead infrastructure migration automation projects: lift-and-shift, re-platforming, or re-architecting monoliths to microservices with scripted, idempotent migration steps and rollback plans.
  • Continuously evaluate emerging cloud automation tools and propose adoption pathways and proof-of-concepts to improve velocity, reliability, and maintainability.
  • Mentor engineers on IaC best practices, Git workflows, pipeline design, and automated testing for infrastructure to elevate team competence and reduce architecture drift.

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 and automated incident escalation flows; author post-incident automation to prevent recurrence.
  • Produce clear documentation and runbooks for platform components, automation patterns, and troubleshooting steps to support internal knowledge sharing.
  • Drive DevSecOps initiatives by collaborating with security engineering to automate compliance scans, policy enforcement, and remediation workflows.
  • Assist in procurement and vendor evaluations for cloud tooling and managed services by running technical proof-of-concepts and cost/benefit analyses.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Deep experience designing and authoring Terraform modules, CloudFormation templates, or Pulumi stacks with reusable patterns, state management, and testing.
  • Cloud Platforms: Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider—AWS (preferred), Azure, or GCP—and working knowledge across multi-cloud deployments and managed services.
  • CI/CD & Pipeline Automation: Proven ability to build automated pipelines in Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps that integrate testing, security scanning, container builds, and deployments.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Production experience with Docker and Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE), including Helm charts, operators, and lifecycle management of clusters and workloads.
  • Configuration Management: Practical skills with Ansible, Chef, or Salt for bootstrapping, patching, and configuration enforcement at scale.
  • Scripting & Programming: Proficient in Python, Go, or Bash for automation tasks, custom tooling, CLI utilities, and lambda/cloud function-based runbooks.
  • Observability & Monitoring: Implement and tune Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stacks, Loki, and tracing systems (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry) to generate actionable alerts and dashboards.
  • Security Automation: Experience integrating security checks into pipelines with IaC scanning tools (Checkov, tfsec), container scanning, and policy-as-code frameworks (OPA, Gatekeeper).
  • GitOps & Declarative Delivery: Practical implementation of GitOps with Argo CD or Flux, including automated promotion, drift detection, and rollback strategies.
  • Secrets & Identity Management: Implement secret stores (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager) and automate IAM/RBAC provisioning with IAM policies and OIDC integration.
  • Networking & Cloud Services: Strong understanding of virtual networking, load balancers, DNS, CDN, VPC peering, and hybrid connectivity (VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute).
  • Automation Frameworks: Familiarity with serverless automation (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions), event-driven automation, and automated remediation workflows.
  • Testing & Validation for IaC: Use of unit and integration testing for infrastructure (Terratest, Kitchen-Terraform), policy testing, and automated linting to ensure reliable deployments.
  • Cost Management Tools: Experience with cloud cost tooling and automations (AWS Cost Explorer automation, Azure Cost Management, FinOps practices).
  • Database & Storage Automation: Automation expertise for provisioning managed databases, backups, storage classes, and lifecycle policies.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving aptitude for diagnosing distributed-system failures and designing automated recovery.
  • Excellent communication and stakeholder management: able to translate technical constraints into business impact and negotiate priorities.
  • Collaborative mindset: experience working across engineering, security, product, and operations teams to deliver platform services.
  • Ownership and bias for action: proactively reduce toil and drive automation that scales.
  • Mentorship and documentation skills: coach engineers on IaC, pipeline best practices, and maintain clear runbooks.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: stays current with cloud-native and automation trends and can evaluate new tools rapidly.
  • Time management and prioritization in high-change environments: balance reliability, speed, and cost trade-offs.
  • Security-first thinking: embed least-privilege and compliance practices in automation design.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent hands-on experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, or a related field, or relevant professional certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–8 years of professional experience in cloud engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, or SRE roles with at least 2+ years focused on automation and IaC.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years building production automation at scale, demonstrable track record of delivering IaC modules, CI/CD pipelines, and Kubernetes platform automation for medium-to-large environments.
  • Experience leading automation projects, cross-team initiatives, or mentoring engineers on automation best practices and platform adoption.
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