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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Systems Engineer

💰 $ - $

CloudEngineeringDevOpsSite Reliability

🎯 Role Definition

A Cloud Systems Engineer is responsible for designing, building, operating, and optimizing scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure. This role blends systems engineering, automation, and platform-as-a-service thinking to deliver reliable production systems across public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and private/hybrid environments. The Cloud Systems Engineer partners with development, security, and product teams to automate deployments, implement infrastructure-as-code (IaC), enforce cloud governance, and lead cloud migrations while maintaining high availability, observability, and compliance.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator with cloud exposure
  • DevOps Engineer or Platform Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Advancement To:

  • Senior Cloud Engineer / Lead Cloud Engineer
  • Cloud Architect / Solutions Architect
  • Head of Cloud Platform / Director of Cloud Operations
  • Site Reliability Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer
  • Cloud Security Engineer
  • Infrastructure Automation Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement and manage secure, highly available cloud infrastructure architectures across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, including VPCs/VNets, subnets, routing, NAT, gateways, load balancers and hybrid connectivity (VPN/Direct Connect/ExpressRoute/Cloud Interconnect).
  • Author, review and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules and templates using Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, or Pulumi to provision and version cloud resources in a repeatable, testable manner.
  • Build, maintain and optimize Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE or self-managed K8s), including cluster autoscaling, networking (Calico/Cilium), ingress controllers, service meshes and cluster lifecycle automation.
  • Design and operate CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or similar tools to automate build, test, and deployment workflows for microservices, containers, and serverless functions.
  • Implement configuration management and orchestration solutions using Ansible, Salt, Chef, or Puppet to ensure consistent system configuration, patching and compliance across environments.
  • Develop automation scripts and tooling in Python, Go, or Bash to streamline operational tasks, perform API-driven orchestration and reduce manual intervention.
  • Implement robust monitoring, logging and observability stacks with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK or Cloud-native monitoring services to provide actionable metrics, alerts and dashboards for SLA-driven systems.
  • Implement centralized logging, tracing and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Zipkin) to troubleshoot complex distributed systems and accelerate incident resolution.
  • Design and operationalize cloud cost management and optimization strategies, including rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, spot instances, and tagging for chargeback and showback.
  • Lead cloud migration efforts, performing discovery, lift-and-shift, re-platforming or refactoring assessments, migration runbooks, scheduling and execution while minimizing downtime and risk.
  • Harden cloud environments by implementing identity and access management (IAM), role-based access control, least privilege policies, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), encryption at rest and in transit, and security group/network ACL best practices.
  • Establish backup, snapshot and disaster recovery strategies, including RPO/RTO definitions, cross-region replication, recovery runbooks and periodic restore testing.
  • Design and enforce platform governance, compliance and audit controls (CIS benchmarks, PCI/DSS, HIPAA, SOC2) in collaboration with security and compliance teams.
  • Manage production incident response, participate in on-call rotations, lead root cause analysis, produce postmortems, and implement permanent fixes to prevent recurrence.
  • Perform capacity planning and performance tuning for compute, storage and network components to meet latency and throughput objectives under expected load patterns.
  • Integrate and manage cloud-native services (RDS, Cloud SQL, DynamoDB, Cosmos DB, BigQuery), caching (Redis/Memcached), and CDN solutions to improve application performance and resilience.
  • Evaluate, pilot and onboard new cloud services or third-party managed services to reduce operational overhead and accelerate developer delivery velocity.
  • Collaborate with development teams to design cloud-native application architectures, define SLIs/SLOs, and implement blue/green or canary deployments to reduce release risk.
  • Create and maintain runbooks, operator playbooks, architecture diagrams, standard operating procedures and technical documentation that enable repeatable operations and knowledge sharing.
  • Drive automation of day‑2 operations, including automated health checks, self-healing routines, and lifecycle management for ephemeral and long-lived resources.
  • Implement network security controls, application layer firewalls, WAF rulesets and DDoS protections (AWS Shield, Azure DDoS Protection) and coordinate with network teams for secure ingress/egress designs.
  • Mentor and coach junior engineers on cloud best practices, IaC patterns, observability, security, and troubleshooting methodologies.
  • Manage vendor relationships and contracts for cloud tooling, managed Kubernetes, monitoring services and third-party SaaS required to operate the platform.
  • Maintain continuous improvement by measuring operational metrics (MTTR, deployment frequency, change failure rate) and driving initiatives to increase platform reliability and delivery speed.
  • Participate in capacity and architecture reviews for new products and features to ensure cloud infrastructure design meets performance, security and cost targets.

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 technical input into procurement and licensing decisions for cloud tooling and managed services.
  • Assist in security assessments, penetration tests and remediation prioritization with the security team.
  • Represent the platform team in cross-functional product and engineering forums, communicating tradeoffs and impacts.
  • Support knowledge transfer sessions, training and onboarding for platform users and internal stakeholders.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expertise with public cloud platforms: AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, EKS, IAM), Azure (VMs, AKS, Azure AD, VNet), and GCP (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Storage).
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) proficiency: Terraform (preferred), AWS CloudFormation, Pulumi or Bicep with module design, state management and CI integration.
  • Container orchestration and microservices platform operations: Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), Docker, helm charts, lifecycle management and cluster security.
  • CI/CD pipeline design and automation using Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps with secure artifact management.
  • Configuration management and automation: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or SaltStack; experience building idempotent playbooks.
  • Observability and monitoring toolchains: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK stacks and OpenTelemetry instrumentation.
  • Networking and security in cloud: VPC/VNet design, route tables, NAT, security groups, network ACLs, VPN/Direct Connect and WAF/DDoS mitigation.
  • Scripting and programming: Python, Go, or Bash for automation, tooling and API integrations.
  • Identity and access management and secrets management: AWS IAM, Azure RBAC, HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager.
  • Database and managed services operations: RDS/Cloud SQL, NoSQL options (DynamoDB, Bigtable), caching (Redis) and data replication patterns.
  • Backup, DR and business continuity planning, including cross-region replication and automated restore testing.
  • Security and compliance controls: knowledge of CIS benchmarks, SOC2, PCI, HIPAA and implementing automated compliance scanning.
  • Cost optimization and cloud financial management: tagging strategies, cost reporting, rightsizing and savings plans.
  • Familiarity with Git workflows, branching strategies and code review practices for infrastructure code.
  • Experience with load balancing, CDN integration (CloudFront/Azure CDN), and TLS certificate management (AWS ACM, Let's Encrypt).

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication tailored to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Collaboration and cross-functional teamwork across engineering, security, product and operations.
  • Problem-solving and troubleshooting under pressure with structured root cause analysis.
  • Customer and service-oriented mindset with an emphasis on reliability and UX for internal developer customers.
  • Time management and prioritization in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
  • Coaching and mentorship to raise team capability and foster knowledge sharing.
  • Continuous improvement mindset and data-driven decision making.
  • Attention to detail and disciplined approach to change control and risk management.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • MS in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, or related field, or equivalent professional certifications.

Certifications / Preferred Credentials:

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect / DevOps Engineer
  • Google Professional Cloud Architect / Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect / Azure DevOps Engineer
  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
  • HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of systems engineering, cloud operations or DevOps experience with demonstrable work provisioning and operating cloud infrastructure.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years operating public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) in production at scale.
  • Hands-on experience delivering IaC-based platforms and production-grade Kubernetes clusters.
  • Proven track record of delivering cloud migrations, cost optimization initiatives, and improving operational metrics (MTTR, deployment frequency).
  • Experience participating in or leading on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident remediation.
  • Prior experience mentoring engineers, defining platform standards, and contributing to cloud strategy and governance.
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