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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Engineer

💰 $ - $

EngineeringCloudDevOpsSREPlatform

🎯 Role Definition

The Cloud Engineer is responsible for designing, deploying, operating and optimizing cloud infrastructure and platform services that enable scalable, secure, cost-efficient applications. This role partners closely with software engineering, security, and product teams to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automated CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration (Kubernetes), cloud-native services (serverless, managed databases), observability, and cloud cost governance. The ideal candidate brings hands-on experience with one or more major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), strong automation skills (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible), and a pragmatic approach to reliability, performance, and security.

Key outcomes: deliver resilient, repeatable infrastructure; reduce time-to-deploy through automation; enforce security and compliance controls; drive cloud cost optimization; and enable development teams with self-service platform tooling.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Cloud Engineer / Cloud Operations Engineer
  • Systems Administrator or Network Engineer transitioning to cloud
  • DevOps Engineer with strong scripting and automation experience

Advancement To:

  • Senior Cloud Engineer / Lead Cloud Engineer
  • Cloud Architect / Solutions Architect
  • Platform Engineering Manager or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer / Platform Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Security Engineer (Cloud-focused)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect, design, and implement scalable and highly available cloud infrastructure using IaC tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Bicep, ensuring environments are reproducible, version-controlled, and modular.
  • Build, maintain, and improve CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps to automate build, test, security scanning, and deployment of applications and infrastructure.
  • Deploy and operate container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, EKS, AKS, GKE) including cluster provisioning, autoscaling, ingress configuration, service mesh basics, and workload deployments with Helm or Kustomize.
  • Implement cloud networking designs including VPC/VNet architecture, subnets, routing, NAT, peering, transit gateways, VPNs, and secure connectivity patterns between on-premises and cloud.
  • Lead cloud migration projects: assess existing workloads, define lift-and-shift or re-architect strategies, create migration runbooks, perform cutovers, and validate post-migration performance and cost.
  • Implement identity and access management (IAM) best practices: least privilege policies, role-based access control (RBAC), federated identity integration, cross-account roles, and privileged access logging.
  • Design and enforce cloud security controls and compliance posture: platform hardening, encryption at-rest and in-transit, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), vulnerability scanning, and remediation workflows.
  • Establish monitoring, logging, and observability platforms using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, CloudWatch, Stackdriver, or Azure Monitor to deliver actionable alerts and SLO/SLI reporting.
  • Optimize cloud costs by implementing tagging strategies, rightsizing instances, reserved/savings plan recommendations, automated shutdown/start scripts, and providing regular cost forecasts and anomaly detection.
  • Automate infrastructure operations and runbooks to reduce manual toil: autoscaling rules, configuration drift detection, backup/restore automation, and self-healing scripts.
  • Provide platform and developer enablement: create self-service templates, CLI tools, internal developer portals, blueprints, and documentation to streamline onboarding and deployments.
  • Troubleshoot production incidents across cloud services, coordinate incident response, perform root cause analysis (RCA), and implement preventative measures to avoid recurrence.
  • Manage and configure managed data services (RDS/Cloud SQL, DynamoDB, BigQuery) and design backup/replication strategies, performance tuning, and capacity planning for databases in the cloud.
  • Implement serverless architectures where appropriate: author and deploy functions (Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Functions), API gateways, event-driven designs, and messaging integrations.
  • Integrate security testing and compliance checks into pipelines (SAST, DAST, IaC linting) and work with security teams to remediate findings prior to production release.
  • Maintain and evolve platform documentation, runbooks, architecture diagrams, and runbook playbooks aligned to change-management practices and audit requirements.
  • Lead proof-of-concept (PoC) projects to evaluate new cloud services, tools, or patterns and provide recommendations, cost estimates, and migration strategies.
  • Collaborate with engineering teams to define non-functional requirements (reliability, latency, throughput), design for failure, and apply chaos engineering principles where useful.
  • Drive infrastructure lifecycle management: patching strategies, AMI/image management, version upgrades of platform components, and coordinated maintenance windows.
  • Establish and manage service-level objectives (SLOs), service-level indicators (SLIs), and alerting thresholds for cloud-hosted services and maintain dashboards for operational visibility.
  • Enforce infrastructure governance: tagging, naming conventions, account/project structure, cost centers, and guardrails to ensure predictable operations at scale.
  • Participate in capacity planning and forecasting for compute, storage, and network resources and propose cost-effective scaling approaches.
  • Mentor junior engineers on cloud best practices, IaC design patterns, and operational excellence; contribute to hiring and technical onboarding.

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 evaluation for cloud services and third-party platform tools.
  • Provide periodic training sessions and brown-bag talks to upskill teams on cloud capabilities and secure usage patterns.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Provider Expertise: Deep hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform) including compute, networking, storage, IAM, and managed services.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficient with Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or Bicep — ability to design reusable modules, state management, and CI/CD integration.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Production experience with Docker and Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE), Helm, operators, and cluster lifecycle management.
  • CI/CD & GitOps: Build and maintain automated pipelines using Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Argo CD, or Flux and implement GitOps workflows.
  • Configuration Management & Automation: Familiar with Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or similar tools to automate configuration and system management tasks.
  • Scripting & Programming: Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or PowerShell; familiarity with Go, Java, or Node.js is a plus for integrations and tooling.
  • Networking & Security: Solid understanding of cloud networking (VPC/VNet, routing, peering, firewalls), security best practices, IAM, and encryption technologies.
  • Observability & Monitoring: Experience implementing monitoring, logging, tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Jaeger, Cloud native monitoring solutions) and setting up alerting and dashboards.
  • Databases & Storage: Operational experience with managed relational and NoSQL databases, object storage (S3/GCS/Azure Blob), backups and DR strategies.
  • Serverless & Event-Driven: Practical experience with serverless functions, API gateways, event buses, and asynchronous patterns.
  • Disaster Recovery & High Availability: Design and test backup, replication, multi-region failover, and business continuity plans.
  • Cost Management & Optimization: Proven ability to analyze cloud bills, propose cost-saving measures, and implement automation to optimize spend.
  • Security Scanning & Compliance: Familiarity with security tooling for IaC scanning, container image scanning, infrastructure compliance frameworks (CIS, GDPR, SOC2).
  • Identity & Access Management: Hands-on with IAM policies, RBAC, federated identity, and secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager).
  • Observability & Performance Tuning: Ability to profile and tune applications and infrastructure for latency, throughput, and resource utilization.

(At least 10 of the above are standard, hireable technical expectations drawn from current cloud engineering roles.)

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication: translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and produce actionable runbooks and architecture docs.
  • Collaboration and influencing: work cross-functionally with engineering, product, security, and operations teams to deliver outcomes.
  • Problem-solving and analytical thinking: quickly diagnose complex cloud outages and propose pragmatic remediation steps.
  • Prioritization and time management: balance incident response, project work, and platform improvements.
  • Mentoring and knowledge sharing: coach junior engineers, run technical workshops, and maintain team standards.
  • Customer-focus: partner with internal teams to reduce friction and accelerate developer productivity.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: stay current on cloud innovations and adjust platform strategy to leverage new, safe patterns.
  • Attention to detail: ensure configuration, security policies, and IaC code are precise and reliable.
  • Resilience and calm under pressure: lead incident response and postmortems with composure.
  • Strategic thinking: contribute to long-term platform roadmap and cost-efficiency strategies.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Cloud Computing, or related field.
  • Relevant cloud certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Google Professional Cloud Architect, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect, HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate) are highly desirable.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software/Systems Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Network Engineering
  • Cloud Computing / DevOps-related programs

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3 to 7+ years of hands-on experience in cloud engineering, platform engineering, or DevOps roles; entry-to-mid levels may start at 2+ years with strong relevant skills.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of progressive responsibility managing production cloud infrastructure, with demonstrated ownership of platform projects, migrations, or large-scale deployments; track record of automation, cost optimization, and reliability improvements.
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