Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Service Manager

💰 $110,000 - $180,000

CloudIT ManagementDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires an experienced Cloud Service Manager to lead cloud operations, governance, and delivery for enterprise-scale environments. The Cloud Service Manager is responsible for designing and operating secure, cost-effective, highly available cloud platforms, coordinating cross-functional teams (DevOps, SRE, Security, Networking), managing vendor relationships and implementing cloud governance, compliance, and FinOps practices. This role requires a hands-on technical background combined with people-management and program delivery skills to ensure cloud services meet business SLAs and strategic objectives.

Primary SEO/LLM keywords: Cloud Service Manager, cloud operations manager, cloud governance, multi-cloud, AWS manager, Azure manager, GCP manager, cloud migration, Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, Terraform, cloud security, FinOps.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Cloud Engineer or Cloud Architect
  • DevOps/SRE Lead or Platform Engineer
  • IT Infrastructure Manager or Systems Engineering Manager

Advancement To:

  • Director / Head of Cloud Services
  • VP of Infrastructure or VP of Cloud Operations
  • Chief Cloud Officer or Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager
  • Platform Engineering Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement and manage scalable, highly available cloud infrastructure across one or more providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), ensuring architectures meet business requirements for performance, reliability, security and cost efficiency.
  • Lead day-to-day cloud operations and incident management, coordinate cross-functional response teams during P1/P0 incidents, perform root cause analysis, and drive corrective and preventative actions.
  • Define, implement and enforce cloud governance, policies and standards (tagging, resource lifecycle, access control, encryption, backup and retention) to ensure compliance with internal and external audit requirements.
  • Build and run a self-service cloud platform and catalog of managed services (compute, storage, database, networking, container platforms) to accelerate developer productivity and reduce manual provisioning.
  • Own cloud financial management and FinOps processes: implement cost allocation, budget forecasts, cost optimization programs, reserved instance/savings plans management and monthly cost reporting to stakeholders.
  • Manage identity and access management (IAM) strategies and implementations, including role-based access control, least privilege, cross-account/tenant trust and privileged access review.
  • Oversee Infrastructure as Code (IaC) authoring and standards (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates), enforce CI/CD for infrastructure changes and review IaC pull requests for security and reliability.
  • Operate and scale container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, EKS, AKS, GKE), manage cluster lifecycle, upgrades, helm charts, and platform observability for production workloads.
  • Develop and maintain cloud security posture: implement network segmentation (VPC/VNet), firewall and WAF configurations, DDoS protection, encrypted communication and secure secret management practices.
  • Collaborate with application teams to plan and execute cloud migration projects, lift-and-shift or re-platform activities, including runbooks, cutover plans and rollback procedures.
  • Evaluate, select and manage third-party cloud service providers, managed service partners and SaaS vendors; negotiate SLAs, contracts and escalate vendor performance issues.
  • Establish and report on cloud service-level agreements (SLAs), service-level objectives (SLOs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) for availability, latency, cost, deployment frequency and incident resolution.
  • Implement monitoring, logging and alerting frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Stackdriver/Operations, ELK) and onboard application teams to use centralized telemetry for observability and troubleshooting.
  • Create and maintain runbooks, playbooks and operational run schedules for routine cloud operations, patching, backups, disaster recovery and business continuity testing.
  • Lead capacity planning and scalability initiatives: forecast compute, storage and network needs, design auto-scaling policies and optimize architectures to meet seasonal and growth demands.
  • Drive cloud automation and developer self-service adoption through templates, blueprints, pipelines and platform tooling to reduce manual changes and increase deployment velocity.
  • Ensure regulatory compliance (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR) for cloud-hosted systems by coordinating audits, evidencing controls, and remediating gaps with security and compliance teams.
  • Mentor and grow a high-performing cloud operations team: hire, coach, set objectives, conduct performance reviews and build career paths for engineers and operations staff.
  • Partner with product and engineering leadership to align cloud roadmaps with business strategy, provide technical input to product planning and contribute to cost/benefit analyses for cloud investments.
  • Manage cross-team projects for cloud transformation, including timeline management, risk mitigation, stakeholder communication and delivery of milestones.
  • Conduct regular architecture reviews and technical due diligence for new cloud initiatives, evaluate trade-offs between managed services and self-managed solutions.
  • Lead continuous improvement initiatives for cloud operations: reduce toil, increase automation, implement post-incident learning loops and track operational maturity 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 training and enablement sessions for development teams on cloud-native best practices, IaC and security-by-design.
  • Assist procurement and legal in defining cloud vendor contracts, SLAs and service terms.
  • Create executive-level dashboards and quarterly reviews summarizing cloud health, security posture and cost trends.
  • Participate in proof-of-concept evaluations for emerging cloud technologies and proofing integration patterns with existing systems.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep operational experience with one or more cloud platforms: AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, IAM), Microsoft Azure (VMs, AKS, Storage, Active Directory) or Google Cloud Platform (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud SQL).
  • Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools, especially Terraform and CloudFormation; able to author, review and enforce IaC best practices and modules.
  • Strong container orchestration and platform management skills: Kubernetes administration, cluster provisioning, Helm, operators and day-2 operations.
  • CI/CD pipeline design and implementation experience (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps) for both application and infrastructure deployments.
  • Cloud networking expertise: VPC/VNet design, VPN/Transit Gateway, peering, load balancing, NAT, routing and hybrid connectivity patterns.
  • Security and compliance knowledge: IAM, encryption at rest/in transit, key management (KMS), cloud security posture management (CSPM) and remediation workflows.
  • Monitoring, logging and observability stacks experience: Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Datadog, ELK/Opensearch; ability to instrument applications and platform.
  • Hands-on scripting and automation skills (Python, Bash, PowerShell) for automating operational tasks and integrations.
  • Cost management and FinOps competency: tagging strategies, cost allocation, reserved instance/savings plan strategy and cost optimization techniques.
  • Experience with database services and managed data platforms (RDS, Aurora, Cloud Spanner, Cosmos DB) and backup/replication strategies.
  • Disaster recovery and business continuity planning for cloud services, including multi-region failover strategies and RTO/RPO definition.
  • Familiarity with service mesh technologies and API gateway patterns (Istio, Linkerd, Kong, Ambassador) for microservices communication management.
  • Proven ability to use identity federation, SSO integrations (SAML, OIDC) and centralized identity providers (Azure AD, Okta).

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership and people management: able to build, mentor and scale high-performing cloud teams.
  • Excellent stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration with engineering, security, finance and product teams.
  • Clear communicator with the ability to present technical concepts to non-technical executives and produce executive-ready reports.
  • Strategic thinker who can align cloud operations with broader business goals and roadmap planning.
  • Problem-solving mindset with a data-driven approach to operational decisions and incident post-mortems.
  • Prioritization and project management skills to run concurrent cloud initiatives and meet delivery timelines.
  • Vendor negotiation and contract management skills for cloud service agreements and managed offerings.
  • Coaching and enablement orientation to raise cloud maturity across the organization and reduce operational debt.
  • Change management savvy to shepherd teams through cloud migration and platform updates.
  • Attention to compliance, governance detail and risk management when designing cloud solutions.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field; or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, IT Management or MBA with technical focus; or advanced certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5 - 12+ years in IT with 3-7+ years specifically managing cloud platforms and teams.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years of progressive experience in cloud operations, platform engineering, or cloud architecture roles.
  • Proven track record managing multi-cloud environments, cloud migrations, or enterprise platform teams.
  • Relevant certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Professional Cloud Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) are highly desirable.
Explore More Careers