Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Technical Lead

💰 $140,000 - $210,000

EngineeringCloudLeadershipDevOpsPlatform

🎯 Role Definition

The Cloud Technical Lead is a hands-on engineering leader who designs, builds, and operates cloud-native platforms and services. This role blends cloud architecture, platform engineering, DevOps best practices, and cross-functional leadership to deliver secure, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure on public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP). The Cloud Technical Lead drives cloud-native strategy, mentors engineers, owns key architectural decisions, and partners with product and security teams to enable rapid, resilient delivery of software.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Cloud Engineer or Senior DevOps Engineer
  • Cloud Solutions Architect or Platform Engineer
  • Lead Software Engineer with cloud and infrastructure ownership

Advancement To:

  • Principal Cloud Architect / Chief Cloud Architect
  • Director / Head of Cloud or Platform Engineering
  • VP of Engineering or CTO for cloud-first organizations

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead
  • Cloud Security Lead / Cloud Compliance Lead
  • Technical Program Manager for Cloud Platforms

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end design and delivery of multi-account, multi-region cloud architectures (AWS/Azure/GCP) that are highly available, fault tolerant, and aligned to business SLAs, including networking, IAM, encryption, and hybrid connectivity.
  • Architect and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks using Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar tools to enable repeatable, auditable and automated provisioning of cloud resources.
  • Define and enforce cloud governance, landing zone patterns, guardrails, tagging strategies, and policies that ensure security, compliance, and cost control across all cloud environments.
  • Lead large-scale cloud migration projects (lift-and-shift, re-platform, re-architect) from on-premises to public cloud or between cloud providers, planning cutover strategies, rollback procedures and minimizing downtime.
  • Design and implement resilient, automated CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, ArgoCD, or Spinnaker to support microservices delivery and infrastructure deployments with zero-downtime releases.
  • Lead containerization strategy and manage Kubernetes platforms (EKS, AKS, GKE, or self-managed K8s), including cluster architecture, autoscaling, multi-tenant isolation, service meshes (Istio/Linkerd), and Helm chart governance.
  • Own platform reliability engineering practices: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, runbooks, on-call rotations, and blameless postmortems to drive measurable uptime and incident response improvements.
  • Define and implement observability and monitoring solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch, or equivalent to provide full-stack visibility and alerting for infrastructure and applications.
  • Architect secure cloud patterns including identity and access management, key management (KMS), secrets management (HashiCorp Vault), encryption at rest/in transit, and threat modeling aligned with SOC2, ISO, GDPR, or HIPAA requirements.
  • Drive cost optimization and cloud financial governance—implement tagging, rightsizing, savings plans, reserved instances, and cost allocation to reduce waste and forecast spend.
  • Mentor, hire, and grow a cross-functional cloud engineering team, establishing career development plans, conducting technical interviews, and driving a culture of continuous improvement.
  • Collaborate directly with product managers, engineering teams and business stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable cloud solutions and realistic delivery roadmaps.
  • Build and maintain automated disaster recovery and backup strategies, defining RTO/RPO requirements and conducting regular DR drills.
  • Integrate platform-level capabilities such as API gateways, identity providers (OIDC/OAuth), message queues (Kafka/PubSub), and caching layers (Redis) to support developer productivity and secure service communication.
  • Lead vendor and third-party cloud service evaluations, proof-of-concepts, and contract negotiations to ensure best‑fit solutions and predictable TCO.
  • Establish and document platform standards, runbooks, architecture decision records (ADRs), and operational playbooks to ensure consistency and knowledge sharing across teams.
  • Drive automation for operational tasks—self-healing, autoscaling policies, brownfield remediation, and lifecycle management for infrastructure and platform components.
  • Champion DevSecOps practices by integrating automated security testing, vulnerability scanning, and container image hardening into the CI/CD pipeline.
  • Evaluate and adopt serverless architectures where appropriate (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions) to reduce operational overhead and accelerate feature delivery.
  • Lead networking and connectivity design including VPC/VNet design, peering, transit gateways, ExpressRoute/Direct Connect, VPN, DNS, and load balancing for secure and performant traffic flows.
  • Act as the primary technical escalation point for complex cloud incidents, coordinating cross-functional teams during major outages and driving long-term remediation.
  • Provide technical thought leadership: run architecture reviews, present roadmap updates to executives, and represent the platform team in technical steering committees.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc infrastructure requests, environment provisioning, and exploratory POCs to validate technical approaches.
  • Contribute to the organization’s cloud strategy and multi-year roadmap, aligning technical decisions to business outcomes.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate functional needs into secure, cost-effective engineering requirements and success metrics.
  • Participate actively in sprint planning, architectural grooming sessions and agile ceremonies, balancing feature delivery and technical debt reduction.
  • Produce clear documentation, runbooks, and training materials to upskill application teams on platform usage and best practices.
  • Evaluate new cloud features and incorporate relevant improvements into the platform with minimal disruption.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Expert-level experience with at least one public cloud (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) and working knowledge of multi-cloud patterns.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi—ability to design modules, enforce state management, and CI-driven deployments.
  • Container Orchestration: Deep experience with Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), Helm, operators, and production-grade cluster operations.
  • CI/CD & GitOps: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Spinnaker; ability to implement secure, automated pipelines for apps and infra.
  • Observability & Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, ELK stack; instrumenting services and defining SLOs/SLIs.
  • Security & Compliance: IAM, KMS, Vault, vulnerability scanning, security automation, and knowledge of SOC2/GDPR/HIPAA compliance controls.
  • Networking & Connectivity: VPC/VNet design, transit architectures, VPN, load balancers, DNS, and hybrid connectivity (Direct Connect / ExpressRoute).
  • Scripting & Automation: Proficient in Python, Go, Bash, or similar for automation, tool-building and operational tasks.
  • Databases & Storage: Experience with managed RDBMS (RDS/Aurora), NoSQL (DynamoDB, Cosmos), object storage (S3/Blob), and caching (Redis).
  • Cost Management: Cloud cost modeling, rightsizing, billing analysis, tagging strategies and financial governance.
  • High Availability & DR: Designing multi-AZ/region deployments, DR planning, backup strategies, and recovery testing.
  • Messaging & Integration: Familiarity with Kafka, Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, API gateways, and asynchronous architectures.
  • Identity & Access Management: SSO, SAML, OAuth/OIDC, role-based access control, and cross-account trust relationships.
  • Platform Engineering Tools: Experience with service meshes, ingress controllers, secrets managers, and policy engines (OPA/Gatekeeper).
  • CI/CD Security: Container image scanning, secret detection, dependency vulnerability management, and shift-left security tooling.

Soft Skills

  • Leadership: Proven ability to lead and inspire engineering teams, set technical direction, and drive accountability.
  • Communication: Clear, concise communicator able to translate complex technical concepts to engineering and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Stakeholder Management: Comfortable aligning competing priorities with product, security, finance, and operations teams.
  • Mentorship: Strong track record mentoring engineers, conducting code/architecture reviews and growing technical capability.
  • Problem Solving: Structured analytical thinker who can triage incidents, lead root cause analysis, and deliver durable solutions.
  • Strategic Thinking: Ability to balance near-term delivery with long-term platform vision and technical debt reduction.
  • Collaboration: Experience working across distributed, cross-functional teams and facilitating consensus.
  • Decision Making: Confident in making and documenting architecture decisions with a focus on risk, cost and scalability.
  • Adaptability: Agile mindset and ability to operate in fast-paced, evolving cloud environments.
  • Documentation: Habit of producing high-quality architecture docs, runbooks, and onboarding materials.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, or related field, and/or relevant industry certifications.
  • Preferred cloud certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Cloud Computing
  • Computer Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 7–12+ years of professional software or infrastructure engineering experience, including 3–5+ years of direct cloud architecture/platform ownership.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years total experience with 5+ years in a cloud lead or architect role, leading teams, delivering multi-cloud or large-scale single-cloud platforms, and driving cross-functional cloud transformations. Demonstrated track record of successful migrations, cost optimization, security/compliance attainment, and production uptime improvements.
Explore More Careers