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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Software Engineer

💰 $ - $

EngineeringCloudSoftware DevelopmentDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

A Cloud Software Engineer designs, builds, and operates scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud-native systems. This role blends software engineering, cloud architecture, infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps practices to deliver resilient microservices, automated CI/CD pipelines, and observability for modern distributed applications. The ideal candidate delivers production-grade code, drives platform improvements, and partners with product, security, and SRE teams to meet operational and business objectives.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Software Engineer with cloud or container experience
  • DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer transitioning to product-focused engineering
  • Backend Engineer experienced with microservices and cloud deployments

Advancement To:

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

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer / Platform Engineer
  • Infrastructure Engineer / Security Engineer
  • Data Engineer working on cloud data platforms

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect, design, and implement cloud-native microservices and APIs using best practices for scalability, resiliency, and security across AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform; drive decisions on serverless vs container-based deployments.
  • Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or Bicep to provision and manage multi-environment cloud infrastructure reliably and reproducibly.
  • Design, implement, and operate CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, ArgoCD) to automate build, test, and deployment workflows with progressive delivery techniques such as canary releases and blue/green deployments.
  • Containerize applications and manage orchestration with Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), including Helm charts, operators, custom resource definitions (CRDs), and autoscaling strategies to ensure availability and cost efficiency.
  • Implement robust application observability: logging, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry,Jaeger), and metrics (Prometheus, Grafana) to enable rapid troubleshooting and data-driven performance improvements.
  • Collaborate with product managers and cross-functional teams to translate requirements into technical solutions, prioritize work, and deliver features that meet performance, reliability, and security SLAs.
  • Optimize application and infrastructure costs through right-sizing, efficient storage and network strategies, spot/commitment usage, and ongoing cloud spend analysis and governance.
  • Harden cloud environments and applications by implementing identity and access management (IAM), VPC/network design, encryption at rest/in transit, security scanning, and continuous compliance tooling.
  • Implement fault-tolerant patterns and disaster recovery strategies including multi-AZ and multi-region deployments, backup and restore plans, and chaos testing to validate system resilience.
  • Write production-quality, unit- and integration-tested code in languages such as Python, Go, Java, or Node.js, and participate in peer code reviews to drive engineering standards and technical excellence.
  • Design and maintain platform services (internal PaaS) that enable developer productivity, including internal service catalogs, shared libraries, and onboarding docs for self-service deployments.
  • Lead technical design reviews and RFCs, provide architectural guidance, and evolve system design to handle increasing scale and complex operational requirements.
  • Build event-driven architectures using messaging and streaming technologies (Kafka, Pub/Sub, SNS/SQS) to decouple services, increase throughput, and improve system resiliency.
  • Develop and maintain secure secrets management and configuration systems (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault) and ensure proper lifecycle and rotation of credentials.
  • Automate repetitive operational tasks using scripts and tooling (Python, Bash, PowerShell) and build operator-style controllers to manage application lifecycle in Kubernetes.
  • Champion DevSecOps practices by integrating automated security tests, vulnerability scanning (Snyk, Trivy), and compliance checks into the pipeline and responding to security incidents with remediation plans.
  • Collaborate with SRE and on-call rotations to monitor production systems, triage incidents, conduct postmortems, and drive remediation and preventative changes.
  • Mentor junior engineers, create onboarding materials, deliver tech talks, and contribute to a continuous learning culture around cloud technologies and reliable systems design.
  • Integrate third-party SaaS, managed services, and open-source components safely and scalably, evaluating trade-offs in managed vs self-hosted approaches.
  • Implement data protection, retention, and privacy controls to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, including logging, audit trails, and secure data handling patterns.
  • Design APIs and SDKs with backward compatibility and versioning strategies to support long-lived client integrations and minimize breaking changes.
  • Continuously evaluate new cloud services and patterns, run prototypes, and recommend adoption roadmaps to improve team velocity and reduce operational overhead.
  • Define and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets in coordination with stakeholders to align reliability with product goals.
  • Participate in capacity planning, performance benchmarking, and load testing to validate system behavior under expected and extreme traffic scenarios.
  • Contribute to open-source projects, internal libraries, and shared tooling to improve maintainability, reduce duplication, and promote community-driven improvements.

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.
  • Document runbooks, architecture diagrams, and development guidelines to reduce mean time to recovery and support onboarding.
  • Assist procurement and vendor evaluation for cloud services and third-party integrations.
  • Provide estimates, participate in delivery planning, and help track engineering KPIs and project milestones.
  • Support proof-of-concept work for new cloud patterns or integrations that enable future product capabilities.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform) including compute, networking, storage, IAM, and managed services.
  • Proficient with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or ARM/Bicep for reproducible cloud deployments.
  • Strong Kubernetes experience: cluster design, Helm, observability, operators, RBAC, network policies, and production-grade operations.
  • Hands-on coding experience in one or more languages used for backend services: Python, Go, Java, C#, or Node.js; ability to write idiomatic, testable code.
  • Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines and release automation using GitOps patterns or pipeline tooling (ArgoCD, Flux, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
  • Familiarity with containerization (Docker), image registries, and secure build pipelines; ability to optimize images for performance and security.
  • Knowledge of distributed systems, microservices patterns, message queues/streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Google Pub/Sub), and event-driven design.
  • Observability tooling expertise: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or equivalent tracing/logging/metrics stacks.
  • Strong knowledge of networking concepts in cloud (VPC, subnets, load balancers, NAT, DNS, peering, transit gateways) and security groups/firewalls.
  • Security and compliance experience: IAM policies, encryption, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, and applying security controls across CI/CD and runtime.
  • Experience with performance tuning, benchmarking, load testing (k6, JMeter), and capacity planning for high-throughput systems.
  • Familiarity with database technologies (RDBMS, NoSQL, managed DB services) and data storage patterns for transactional and analytical workloads.
  • Experience with cost optimization, tagging strategies, and governance for cloud resource management and billing control.
  • Automation and scripting skills (Python, Bash, PowerShell) used to create developer tools, operators, and maintenance scripts.
  • Exposure to serverless architectures and managed functions (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions) and when to apply them.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving mindset with the ability to break down complex system failures and implement long-term fixes.
  • Clear written and verbal communication to document architecture, write RFCs, and present technical decisions to cross-functional stakeholders.
  • Collaboration and influence: ability to work closely with product, security, QA, and SRE teams and drive consensus on trade-offs.
  • Ownership and bias for action: takes responsibility for production systems and follows through on reliability and performance improvements.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: keeps current with cloud trends, tools, and best practices and shares knowledge with the team.
  • Mentorship and coaching: supports junior engineers and contributes to hiring, interviews, and team skill development.
  • Prioritization and time management in a fast-paced, agile environment with competing deadlines.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in a related technical field or relevant cloud certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7+ years of professional software engineering experience with at least 2+ years focused on cloud-native development and operations.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of experience building and operating production systems in public cloud environments, experience leading technical design and mentoring engineers, and demonstrated impact on reliability, performance, or cloud cost optimization.
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