Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Storage Engineer

💰 $ - $

EngineeringCloudStorageDevOpsInfrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

As a Cloud Storage Engineer you will design, deploy, operate and optimize scalable storage platforms across public cloud and on‑premises environments. The role focuses on object and block storage architecture (AWS S3, GCP Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, Ceph, MinIO), data lifecycle and retention policies, backup and disaster recovery, security and encryption, performance tuning, capacity planning, automation (Terraform, Ansible), and integration with container platforms (Kubernetes CSI). This position partners closely with platform, security, data and application teams to ensure reliable, cost-efficient, and compliant storage services that meet SLAs.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator with storage responsibilities
  • Storage Administrator or SAN/NAS Engineer
  • DevOps or Platform Engineer with cloud storage exposure

Advancement To:

  • Senior Cloud Storage Engineer / Storage Architect
  • Cloud Infrastructure Architect or Platform Engineering Lead
  • Head of Infrastructure / Director of Cloud Operations

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Data Engineer / Data Platform Engineer
  • Cloud Security Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, architect, and implement scalable object and block storage solutions across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, ensuring alignment with business requirements for performance, durability, and cost-efficiency (AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Ceph, MinIO).
  • Lead storage platform migrations and cloud adoption projects: assess current state, define migration strategy, execute data transfer, validate integrity, and optimize post-migration performance and costs.
  • Define and enforce data lifecycle management policies—including tiering, archiving, retention, and legal hold—to optimize storage costs while meeting compliance and regulatory requirements.
  • Implement and operate backup, snapshot, replication, and disaster recovery (DR) strategies for critical application and data workloads; design RPO / RTO plans and conduct regular DR exercises.
  • Build automated infrastructure as code (IaC) for storage resources using Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates, or similar tools to ensure repeatable, auditable deployments.
  • Integrate storage platforms with Kubernetes (CSI drivers), container orchestration systems, and stateful workloads to provide persistent storage solutions for cloud-native applications.
  • Implement encryption at rest and in transit, key management integration (KMS), and access control (IAM) best practices to maintain data confidentiality and integrity.
  • Perform capacity planning and forecasting for short- and long-term storage needs, including cost models, trend analysis, and actionable recommendations to stakeholders.
  • Monitor storage health, performance, and utilization using Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Stackdriver, or vendor monitoring tools; create alerts, runbooks, and dashboards to maintain SLAs.
  • Tune storage performance for latency-sensitive and throughput-heavy workloads by configuring caching, replication modes, object lifecycle, and block-level parameters.
  • Automate day-to-day storage operations and runbooks (provisioning, resizing, reclamation, patching, scaling) using scripting languages (Python, Bash, PowerShell) and automation frameworks (Ansible).
  • Implement data protection and compliance controls including immutability (WORM), audit logging, access reviews, and integration with SIEM or governance tools.
  • Troubleshoot complex storage incidents as part of an on-call rotation, drive root cause analysis (RCA), and implement corrective and preventive actions to reduce recurrence.
  • Collaborate with application, database, and platform teams to define storage requirements, service level objectives (SLOs), and cost allocation models for shared storage services.
  • Evaluate, pilot, and recommend new storage technologies (object storage gateways, NVMe, software-defined storage, hybrid cloud replication) to improve resilience and TCO.
  • Manage storage vendor relationships and procurement cycles: evaluate vendor offerings, lead POCs, negotiate SLAs, and oversee firmware and hardware lifecycle for on-prem systems.
  • Securely manage data ingress/egress and large-scale data transfers (multi‑TB/PB), leveraging transfer acceleration, parallel copy tooling, signed URLs, and cross-region replication patterns.
  • Create and maintain comprehensive documentation: architecture diagrams, runbooks, operational playbooks, capacity plans, and security control matrices for storage services.
  • Implement multi-tenant storage segmentation, quotas, billing/chargeback mechanisms, and governance to enable platform-as-a-service for internal development teams.
  • Lead performance and cost optimization initiatives: analyze storage bills, identify waste, implement lifecycle/tiering, and recommend storage-class transitions to reduce spend.
  • Design and operate high-availability storage topologies and replication strategies across availability zones and regions to meet business continuity requirements.
  • Mentor junior engineers and contribute to hiring, onboarding, and continuous improvement of storage team practices and standards.

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 subject-matter-expert (SME) guidance during application architecture reviews to ensure appropriate storage choices.
  • Assist in auditing and remediating storage-related security findings from internal and external assessments.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience with cloud object and block storage platforms: AWS S3 (including S3 lifecycle, S3 Intelligent‑Tiering, S3 Glacier), Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage.
  • Familiarity with software-defined storage and distributed object stores such as Ceph, MinIO, OpenStack Swift, or similar.
  • Strong knowledge of storage networking and protocols: NFS, SMB, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and S3 REST APIs.
  • Infrastructure as Code and automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates, Ansible, or similar tools to provision and manage storage infrastructure.
  • Container storage integration: experience implementing and supporting CSI drivers, dynamic provisioning, StatefulSets, and persistent volumes in Kubernetes.
  • Backup, snapshot, replication, and disaster recovery tooling and practices (Velero, vendor backup solutions, cross-region replication).
  • Security and compliance: IAM, encryption (KMS), key rotation, data masking, immutability/WORM, audit logging, and GDPR/HIPAA awareness.
  • Performance tuning and benchmarking: fio, dd, iostat, storage vendor performance tools, and experience optimizing for IOPS/latency/throughput.
  • Scripting and programming: Python, Bash, PowerShell for automation, tooling, and incident response.
  • Monitoring and observability: Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Stackdriver, ELK/EFK, and custom alerting and runbook creation.
  • Capacity planning, cost modeling, and chargeback/billing for storage consumption and optimization.
  • Networking and cloud fundamentals: VPC/VNet design, routing, security groups, peering, and data transfer cost optimization.
  • Experience with hybrid cloud solutions and data transfer tools (Data Transfer Appliance, Storage Gateway, rsync, rclone, AzCopy, gsutil).
  • Familiarity with storage hardware lifecycle, firmware management, and vendor support processes for on-prem solutions.

Soft Skills

  • Strong verbal and written communication; able to explain complex storage concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Problem-solving and analytical mindset with ability to lead RCA and put preventative measures in place.
  • Collaboration and stakeholder management; works cross-functionally with product, security, SRE, and data teams.
  • Prioritization and time management to handle competing demands and incident response duties.
  • Documentation and knowledge-sharing orientation—creates clear runbooks, playbooks, and training materials.
  • Mentoring and team leadership—guides junior engineers and contributes to hiring and team development.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning—stays current with evolving cloud storage technologies and best practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in a related field, or industry certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect/Professional, Google Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Architect, HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate, CNCF certifications).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems / IT Management
  • Electrical or Computer Engineering
  • Data Science / Applied Mathematics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years of experience in system administration, storage administration, or cloud infrastructure engineering with at least 2+ years focused on cloud storage platforms.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years managing enterprise-scale storage infrastructure across cloud and on-premises environments, experience leading migrations, and proven track record in designing resilient storage architectures and DR strategies.
Explore More Careers