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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Support Engineer

💰 $ - $

CloudDevOpsSRESupport

🎯 Role Definition

The Cloud Support Engineer is a customer-facing technical specialist responsible for diagnosing, troubleshooting, and resolving complex cloud infrastructure and platform issues across public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerized environments. This role blends deep systems and networking knowledge with automation, observability, and customer communication skills to ensure high reliability, performance, and security for cloud-native workloads. Ideal candidates have hands-on experience with Linux, IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), Kubernetes, networking, and scripting, and can translate technical guidance into repeatable solutions and knowledgebase content.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator / Linux Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer (junior)
  • Technical Support Engineer or Site Reliability Technician

Advancement To:

  • Senior Cloud Support Engineer / Staff Cloud Support Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Production Engineer
  • Cloud Solutions Architect or Principal Cloud Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Cloud Security Engineer
  • Platform Engineer / Kubernetes Operator

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Provide expert-level troubleshooting and root cause analysis for customer-reported issues across compute, storage, networking, and platform services in AWS, Azure, and GCP, using logs, tracing, metrics, and live diagnostic tools to identify and remediate production incidents rapidly.
  • Serve as a primary technical point of contact for escalated cloud incidents, coordinating cross-functional engineering teams, third-party vendors, and on-call rotations to drive incidents to timely resolution while maintaining clear, customer-facing communication.
  • Design, document, and implement repeatable runbooks and automated playbooks (using scripting or orchestration tools) to reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR) and prevent recurrence of common failure modes in cloud environments.
  • Analyze and optimize customer architectures for scalability, reliability, cost efficiency, and security posture; provide prescriptive recommendations on instance sizing, autoscaling, database design, and managed service selection.
  • Lead live troubleshooting sessions including packet captures, kernel-level debugging, container runtime inspections, and application profiling; correlate multi-layer telemetry (app, container, host, network) to isolate root cause in distributed systems.
  • Deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, EKS, AKS, GKE), including pod scheduling issues, persistent volume management, ingress controllers, and network policies.
  • Administer and harden Linux-based systems and virtual machines, perform kernel and package troubleshooting, manage systemd services, storage subsystems, and remote diagnostics under elevated customer SLAs.
  • Own and improve monitoring and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, Stackdriver), define meaningful SLOs/SLIs, set alerting rules, and resolve noise/false positives while ensuring actionable alerts.
  • Implement and support infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates) for provisioning cloud resources; troubleshoot state drift, dependency errors, and CI/CD pipeline failures that impact deployments.
  • Diagnose and remediate networking issues across virtual private clouds, subnets, routing tables, security groups, VPC peering, load balancers, and DNS, including BGP, NAT, and firewall rule interaction problems.
  • Investigate and respond to security incidents and vulnerabilities in customer environments in partnership with security teams, including privilege escalation analysis, network isolation, forensic data collection, and remediation guidance.
  • Provide detailed technical case management and documentation for support tickets, escalating when necessary, and ensuring SLAs and customer satisfaction (CSAT) targets are met through proactive follow-ups and closure notes.
  • Collaborate with product and engineering teams to triage, reproduce, and resolve platform bugs; contribute to backlog prioritization and provide customer impact assessments to shape product fixes and releases.
  • Build and deliver knowledge base articles, technical how-tos, troubleshooting guides, and sample automation scripts that empower customers and internal teams to resolve frequently encountered issues.
  • Automate routine operational tasks and incident responses using scripting languages (Python, Bash) or automation frameworks (Ansible, Salt), and integrate automation into runbooks and CI pipelines for consistent outcomes.
  • Conduct architecture reviews and cloud readiness assessments for customer migrations, identifying potential compatibility, scalability, and security risks and proposing phased migration strategies with measurable success criteria.
  • Mentor junior support engineers and lead post-incident reviews (postmortems) to capture root causes, corrective actions, and preventive measures; track remediation items and ensure closure through follow-up actions.
  • Assist customers with cost optimization initiatives, including rightsizing recommendations, reserved instance/commitment strategies, tagging, billing analysis, and lifecycle management of ephemeral resources.
  • Validate and enforce best practices for backups, disaster recovery, and business continuity—designing recovery plans, testing failover processes, and documenting RTO/RPO expectations.
  • Troubleshoot CI/CD and deployment pipeline failures (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions), container image build issues, and registry problems that prevent successful application rollouts to cloud platforms.
  • Support hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity patterns such as VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, and inter-region replication; validate throughput, latency, and routing to ensure consistent application behavior.
  • Participate in on-call rotations and after-hours incident response; maintain composure under pressure while delivering timely updates and actionable remediation steps to stakeholders.

Secondary Functions

  • Provide proactive health checks and adoption guidance to improve customer onboarding and time-to-value for cloud services.
  • Create sample automation templates and reference architectures that accelerate customer cloud adoption and reduce deployment complexity.
  • Work cross-functionally with account teams to provide technical pre-sales support, proof-of-concept validation, and technical due diligence during customer evaluations.
  • Contribute telemetry and anonymized usage patterns to product analytics to help prioritize feature improvements and reliability investments.
  • Support internal enablement by developing training modules, runbook exercises, and case study summaries that upskill the broader support and solutions teams.
  • Participate in community forums, customer workshops, and technical webinars to share best practices and highlight common troubleshooting techniques.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience troubleshooting Linux systems (Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS) at the OS, kernel, and filesystem levels; comfortable using strace, tcpdump, systemd, journalctl, and performance profiling tools.
  • Strong proficiency with at least one public cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP) — provisioning, IAM, networking, compute, storage, and managed services troubleshooting.
  • Hands-on Kubernetes expertise: pod lifecycle, Helm charts, networking (CNI), persistent storage (CSI), controllers, and cluster lifecycle operations (kubeadm/EKS/GKE/AKS).
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates; ability to debug state issues, manage modules, and implement CI-driven provisioning.
  • Solid networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, routing, NAT, load balancing, DNS, VPNs, BGP concepts, and troubleshooting tools like traceroute, mtr, and iproute2.
  • Observability and monitoring tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, Stackdriver, ELK/EFK stacks, and experience turning telemetry into actionable alerts and dashboards.
  • Scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or Go, including the ability to write maintenance scripts, automation playbooks, and integration with REST APIs.
  • CI/CD and container image tooling knowledge: Docker, container registries, image signing, Jenkins/GitLab/GitHub Actions pipelines, and troubleshooting deployment failures.
  • Security and compliance familiarity: IAM policies, encryption in transit and at rest, vulnerability scanning, remediation workflows, and incident response fundamentals.
  • Storage and database troubleshooting: block vs object storage, EBS/EFS/FSx/GCS buckets, RDS/Cloud SQL, NoSQL services, and replication/troubleshooting concepts.

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication skills for clear, empathetic customer interactions and precise technical documentation.
  • Excellent problem-solving and analytical abilities with a methodical approach to root cause analysis in complex, distributed systems.
  • Customer-centric mindset: ability to manage expectations, deliver under SLA constraints, and translate technical details into business impact.
  • Collaboration and teamwork: experience coordinating across engineering, product, security, and account teams to drive resolution and improvements.
  • Time management and prioritization for handling multiple concurrent cases and on-call responsibilities with attention to SLAs.
  • Continuous learning attitude: staying current with evolving cloud technologies, certifications, and industry best practices.
  • Coaching and mentoring capability to uplift junior engineers and share tribal knowledge across the organization.
  • Bias for automation and repeatability: preference for preventing manual toil through scripts, templates, and systems design.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or equivalent technical diploma with relevant hands-on experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science/Engineering, or equivalent industry certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Administrator, Google Professional Cloud Engineer).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–6 years in systems administration, DevOps, SRE, or cloud support roles (varies by seniority).

Preferred:

  • 3+ years supporting production cloud environments in a customer-facing or on-call capacity, demonstrated experience with at least one major public cloud provider, Kubernetes, Terraform, and scripting to automate operational tasks.
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