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cloud operations engineer

title: Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Operations Engineer
salary: $110,000 - $170,000
categories: [Cloud, Operations, DevOps, SRE, Infrastructure]
description: A comprehensive overview of the key responsibilities, required technical skills and professional background for the role of a Cloud Operations Engineer.
Detailed, recruiter-style breakdown of the Cloud Operations Engineer role: responsibilities,
required technical and soft skills, career progression, education and experience.

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires a pragmatic, automation-first Cloud Operations Engineer (CloudOps) to own the reliability, operational excellence, and cost-effective running of cloud infrastructure and platform services. The ideal candidate will blend strong systems and networking fundamentals with expertise in infrastructure-as-code (IaC), CI/CD, container orchestration (Kubernetes), monitoring & observability, and incident response. This role partners with engineering, security and product teams to deliver scalable, secure, and observable cloud platforms.

Keywords: Cloud Operations Engineer, CloudOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, monitoring, automation, incident management.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator with cloud exposure (AWS/Azure/GCP)
  • DevOps Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
  • Cloud Platform Support or Junior SRE

Advancement To:

  • Senior Cloud Operations Engineer / Senior SRE
  • Cloud Platform Architect / Cloud Architect
  • Engineering Manager, Site Reliability Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer
  • Cloud Security Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement and maintain highly available, fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure across one or more public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) using infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates to ensure consistent, auditable provisioning and change control.
  • Operate, scale and troubleshoot Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE or self-managed) and containerized workloads, applying best practices for resource limits, auto-scaling, network policies, and upgrade/maintenance strategies to minimize disruption in production.
  • Build, maintain, and improve CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, ArgoCD) to automate application and platform delivery, enabling frequent, reliable deployments with robust rollback and canary strategies.
  • Implement and maintain robust monitoring and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, ELK) including alerting, dashboards, SLO/SLI/SLAs, and tracing to rapidly detect and resolve incidents and to drive system improvements.
  • Lead incident response and post-incident reviews: own on-call responsibilities, perform root cause analysis, document action plans and runbooks, and implement preventative measures to reduce recurrence and mean time to recovery (MTTR).
  • Automate operational tasks and repetitive processes using scripting and programming languages (Python, Go, Bash) to improve runbook automation, deployment velocity and operational consistency.
  • Implement cloud security best practices in collaboration with security teams: identity and access management (IAM), network segmentation, encryption, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and vulnerability/patch management for cloud workloads.
  • Manage cloud networking and connectivity: VPC/VNet design, subnets, routing, VPN, direct connect/expressroute, load balancers, NAT, firewall configurations and troubleshooting for secure, performant application traffic flows.
  • Design and implement cost governance and cloud spend optimization programs: rightsizing, reserved/committed use, tagging strategies, budget alerts and cost reporting to support efficient cloud consumption.
  • Maintain backup and disaster recovery strategies and run regular DR tests to ensure recoverability of critical systems, including restoration procedures, data integrity checks and RTO/RPO compliance.
  • Enforce and contribute to platform and infrastructure standards, policies and documentation: IaC module libraries, build templates, service catalogs, and runbooks to accelerate developer adoption and reduce misconfiguration risk.
  • Collaborate closely with development teams to design production-ready architectures, review architecture, and provide operational guidance for new services and feature rollouts to ensure observability, reliability and scalability.
  • Manage configuration and orchestration tooling (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) to apply system configurations at scale, ensure drift detection and automate patching and baseline enforcement.
  • Deploy and manage logging and centralized telemetry pipelines (ELK/Opensearch, Fluentd/FluentBit, Filebeat) to ensure consistent log retention, indexing and searchability for troubleshooting and compliance.
  • Continuously evaluate and recommend platform improvements, emerging cloud services and third-party tools that reduce toil, increase stability and accelerate developer productivity.
  • Implement fine-grained access controls and least-privilege models for platform components, and support audits and compliance programs (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI) by producing evidence and implementing controls.
  • Drive proactive capacity planning and performance tuning across compute, storage and network resources to meet forecasted demand and maintain consistent performance SLAs.
  • Operate and maintain service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd) where applicable to provide secure, observable service-to-service communications, traffic shaping and policy enforcement.
  • Build and maintain self-service platform capabilities and developer tooling to enable teams to provision environments and manage deployments safely and autonomously.
  • Partner with product and business owners to define SLOs/SLIs, availability targets and prioritize reliability work against feature development and technical debt.
  • Mentor and onboard junior engineers, document operational procedures, and lead knowledge transfer sessions to grow team capabilities and resilience.
  • Maintain vendor relationships, coordinate support with cloud provider support teams, and escalate critical platform incidents to ensure timely remediation.

Secondary Functions

  • Develop and maintain runbooks, playbooks and operational runbooks for common incidents and maintenance tasks; ensure these are accessible and regularly reviewed.
  • Support capacity forecasting, procurement coordination and optimization for cloud resources, storage and third-party SaaS dependencies.
  • Contribute to platform cost reporting and tagging taxonomy; assist finance and engineering managers with monthly cloud cost analyses and optimization recommendations.
  • Participate in security incident response drills, provide evidence for compliance audits, and execute remediation plans for identified weaknesses.
  • Facilitate knowledge sharing and cross-team workshops on cloud best practices, IaC patterns, and troubleshooting methodologies.
  • Support continuous improvement initiatives and identify automation candidates to reduce manual intervention in platform operations.
  • Coordinate scheduled maintenance and upgrades with stakeholders, minimizing service disruption and communicating implications to customers and teams.
  • Manage third-party platform tools and integrations, perform vendor assessments and implement contractual or SLA-based operational requirements.
  • Provide occasional out-of-hours support for critical production incidents and contribute to a healthy on-call rotation with detailed post-incident follow-ups.
  • Assist in proof-of-concept evaluations for new cloud services or architectural patterns and document findings and operational impacts.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep expertise with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure or GCP) — provisioning, IAM, networking, storage, compute, managed services and cost controls.
  • Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates and modular IaC best practices.
  • Kubernetes and container orchestration expertise (EKS/AKS/GKE or upstream), including Helm charts, operators, cluster maintenance and upgrade strategies.
  • CI/CD pipeline design and automation using Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD or similar tools; experience with GitOps patterns.
  • Observability stack implementation and tuning: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/Opensearch, Fluentd/FluentBit and distributed tracing (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry).
  • Scripting and automation skills in Python, Go, Bash, or similar languages to build tooling, automation and operational scripts.
  • Configuration management experience with Ansible, Puppet, or Chef for consistent system state and automated patching.
  • Networking knowledge: CIDR, routing, NAT, VPN, load balancing, firewall policies, and cloud provider network services.
  • Security and compliance operationalization: IAM, key management, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault), encryption at rest/in transit, and logging for auditability.
  • Incident management and root cause analysis skills, with experience running blameless post-mortems and improving system reliability from findings.
  • Backup, recovery and disaster recovery design and operational validation, including RPO/RTO planning and testing.
  • Experience with service mesh, API gateways, and edge technologies where applicable.
  • Cloud cost optimization techniques: rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, storage tiering, and tagging strategies.
  • Version control and code review best practices (Git workflows, pull requests) and familiarity with policy-as-code tools (OPA, Sentinel).

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication skills for clear incident communications, runbooks, and cross-team collaboration.
  • Customer-centric mindset with the ability to translate technical operational needs into business impact and priorities.
  • Excellent troubleshooting and analytical thinking under pressure, able to decompose complex production issues to root causes.
  • Proactive ownership and bias for automation; comfortable driving initiatives without prescriptive guidance.
  • Collaborative team player with experience working closely with developers, product managers, security and support teams.
  • Effective time management and prioritization in a fast-paced, incident-driven environment.
  • Mentoring and knowledge-sharing orientation to uplift team capabilities and improve operational maturity.
  • Adaptability to evolving cloud technologies and willingness to learn new tools and platforms quickly.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a relevant technical discipline.
  • Relevant certifications such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer / AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer / Azure Administrator, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Network Engineering
  • Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7+ years in cloud operations, DevOps or SRE roles with demonstrated hands-on ownership of production cloud systems.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years operating production cloud platforms and services in a team responsible for availability, performance and security.
  • Proven track record of implementing IaC at scale, running Kubernetes in production, and building automated CI/CD pipelines.
  • Experience on-call for production systems and leading incident response with documented post-incident improvements.
  • Demonstrated ability to drive cost optimization and platform reliability improvements in collaboration with cross-functional teams.
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