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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Support Specialist

💰 $70,000 - $120,000

CloudIT SupportDevOpsAWSAzureGCPSRE

🎯 Role Definition

The Cloud Support Specialist is a technical, customer-facing engineer who provides first- and second-line support for cloud-hosted environments and platform services. This role focuses on troubleshooting and resolving complex infrastructure and application issues across public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), managing incidents to SLA, performing root-cause analysis, automating recurring tasks, and collaborating with product, engineering, and security teams to improve reliability and operational efficiency. The ideal candidate combines strong systems and networking fundamentals with experience in cloud-native tooling, scripting/automation (Python, Bash, Terraform), observability stacks (CloudWatch, Stackdriver, Prometheus), and excellent communication skills for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Cloud Support Engineer / Technical Support Engineer (cloud-focused)
  • Systems Administrator or Linux Administrator
  • Junior DevOps Engineer or Site Reliability Junior

Advancement To:

  • Senior Cloud Support Specialist / Lead Cloud Support Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Cloud Operations Engineer
  • Cloud Operations Manager or Head of Cloud Support

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Engineer (platform or infrastructure)
  • DevOps Engineer (CI/CD, automation)
  • Solutions Architect (cloud solutioning)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Provide timely, high-quality technical support and incident response for customers and internal teams across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform environments, owning issues from initial report through resolution and post-incident analysis.
  • Diagnose and remediate complex production incidents involving networking (VPC, subnets, routing, load balancers), storage (S3, EBS, Blob), compute (EC2, VM, auto-scaling), and containerized workloads (EKS, AKS, GKE).
  • Triage and resolve support tickets in a ticketing system (Jira, Zendesk, ServiceNow), prioritize by impact and SLA, and escalate to engineering or product teams when appropriate.
  • Perform root-cause analysis (RCA) after outages, produce clear postmortem documentation with actionable remediation and preventative measures, and lead follow-up implementation when required.
  • Configure, maintain, and troubleshoot Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates and pipelines using Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates to ensure reproducible, auditable infrastructure changes.
  • Automate routine operational tasks and runbooks using scripting languages (Python, Bash, PowerShell) and automation tools (Ansible, AWS Systems Manager) to reduce time-to-resolution and human error.
  • Monitor and tune application and infrastructure performance using observability tools (CloudWatch, Stackdriver / Cloud Monitoring, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana), creating alerts and dashboards to proactively detect issues.
  • Support onboarding and migration of customer workloads to cloud platforms, advising on best practices for architecture, cost optimization, security posture, and performance.
  • Implement and enforce identity and access management (IAM) best practices, including role-based access control, least privilege models, and multi-account strategies.
  • Assist with cloud cost monitoring and optimization efforts: analyze billing data, identify cost drivers, recommend rightsizing, reserved instance/commitment strategies, and tagging strategies for cost allocation.
  • Maintain backup, snapshot, and disaster recovery plans, test recovery procedures, and coordinate failover exercises for critical systems.
  • Secure cloud environments by working with security teams to apply hardening guidelines, manage security groups/network ACLs, enable encryption at rest and in transit, and respond to security incidents and vulnerability reports.
  • Troubleshoot and resolve container orchestration issues related to Kubernetes (pods, services, ingress, persistent volumes), container registries, and CI/CD interactions that impact deployments and availability.
  • Provide hands-on support for databases and managed services (RDS, Cloud SQL, Cosmos DB, DynamoDB), including connectivity, performance tuning, backups, and replication issues.
  • Maintain and contribute to a knowledge base and runbook library (how-tos, FAQs, escalation paths, remediation steps) to accelerate internal onboarding and improve customer self-service.
  • Work with product and engineering teams to reproduce customer issues in staging or test environments, collect debug logs and traces, and propose code- or configuration-level fixes.
  • Participate in on-call rotations and incident management playbooks, providing reliable 24/7 coverage as required and communicating status updates to stakeholders during escalations.
  • Ensure configuration management and change control processes are followed for infrastructure updates, deployments, and emergency changes to minimize risk.
  • Enforce and document compliance requirements (HIPAA, SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR) as they relate to cloud operations and assist with audits by providing evidence of controls and procedures.
  • Mentor junior support engineers and collaborate with training teams to develop internal training materials, runbook walkthroughs, and knowledge-sharing sessions.
  • Evaluate and recommend cloud-native services or third-party solutions to replace brittle systems, reduce operational load, or improve scalability and reliability.
  • Lead or contribute to cross-functional projects (migration, modernization, platform upgrades) delivering technical leadership, clear timelines, and mitigation plans to reduce customer impact.
  • Track key operational metrics (MTTR, MTTA, ticket volume, SLA compliance) and produce regular reports with insights and improvement plans for leadership.

Secondary Functions

  • Assist in creating customer-facing technical documentation, best-practice guides, and migration checklists that reduce repetitive support requests.
  • Support ad-hoc automation requests for customers and internal teams, such as scripts for bulk configuration changes or remediation tasks.
  • Participate in product feedback loops by capturing recurring customer issues, feature requests, and usability problems, and liaise with product managers to prioritize fixes.
  • Collaborate with security and compliance teams to remediate audit findings and implement preventive controls across cloud accounts.
  • Help design and run customer workshops and technical enablement sessions (architecture reviews, incident preparedness, cost optimization).
  • Contribute to continuous improvement initiatives that reduce incident frequencies and shorten time-to-resolution through better tooling and observability.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep knowledge of at least one major public cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform) with hands-on experience provisioning, operating, and troubleshooting compute, storage, networking, and managed services.
  • Proficient with Linux system administration (processes, file systems, logging, package management, systemd) and comfortable debugging system-level issues.
  • Strong networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, load balancing, NAT, VPN, VPC design, security groups, and firewall troubleshooting in a cloud context.
  • Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS/AKS/GKE) including manifests, services, ingress, and persistent volumes.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) proficiency using Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates to provision reproducible cloud infrastructure and manage lifecycle.
  • Scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or PowerShell for building remediation scripts, diagnostic tools, and integration with APIs.
  • Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) and troubleshooting deployment-related failures.
  • Experience with monitoring, logging, and tracing tools such as CloudWatch, Stackdriver/Cloud Logging, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, and distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin, OpenTelemetry).
  • Database troubleshooting experience across managed and self-managed databases (Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB), including backup and restore operations and replication issues.
  • Security and identity management experience: IAM policies, role design, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), encryption strategies, and vulnerability remediation.
  • Working knowledge of networking and cloud cost optimization techniques, tagging strategies, and billing analysis tools.
  • Familiarity with incident management and ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk, Zendesk) and on-call tooling (PagerDuty, Opsgenie).
  • Ability to use cloud provider CLIs and SDKs (awscli, az cli, gcloud) and read cloud provider logs and service limits to diagnose root causes.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional verbal and written communication skills for clear status updates, customer-facing explanations, and technical documentation.
  • Strong customer orientation and empathy: ability to manage escalations calmly, set expectations, and follow through on commitments.
  • Analytical problem-solving mindset with attention to detail and ability to perform thorough root-cause analysis.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance urgent incidents with longer-term reliability projects.
  • Collaboration and stakeholder management: works well with product, engineering, sales, and customer success teams to resolve issues and deliver improvements.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning orientation to keep pace with evolving cloud services, tools, and security threats.
  • Coaching and mentorship: ability to transfer knowledge to junior engineers and run effective troubleshooting sessions.
  • Initiative and ownership: drives tasks to completion and proactively reduces operational debt.
  • Documentation and knowledge-sharing focus to continuously improve runbooks and reduce repeated escalations.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in related technical field and/or industry certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect / SysOps Administrator, Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator, Google Associate Cloud Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–5 years of hands-on experience supporting cloud infrastructure, platform services, or cloud-native applications in a production environment.

Preferred:

  • 3+ years of direct cloud support or operations experience across one or more major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • Prior customer-facing technical support or managed services experience, including SLA-driven incident response and on-call rotations.
  • Demonstrated experience with automation (Terraform, scripts), container orchestration (Kubernetes), observability tooling, and security/compliance practices.
  • Certifications such as AWS Associate/Professional, Microsoft Azure Administrator/DevOps, Google Cloud Engineer, or CKA are highly desirable.
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