Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Platform Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

A Cloud Platform Engineer designs, builds, and operates the underlying cloud infrastructure and developer platforms that enable product teams to deploy scalable, secure, and observable services. This role blends deep cloud provider expertise (AWS, GCP, Azure), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), container orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD automation, security best practices, and operational excellence to reduce friction for developers and improve reliability for production workloads. The ideal candidate balances hands-on engineering with platform strategy, documentation, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver self-service, repeatable, and cost-efficient cloud platforms.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

DevOps Engineer transitioning to platform-first responsibilities.
Systems or Infrastructure Engineer expanding into cloud-native tooling.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) moving toward platform design and developer experience.

Advancement To:

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer / Staff Cloud Platform Engineer
Platform Architect / Infrastructure Architect
Director of Platform Engineering or Head of Infrastructure

Lateral Moves:

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Developer Experience / Developer Productivity Engineer
Cloud Security Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Architect, design, and implement scalable cloud infrastructure solutions using one or more major public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), ensuring high availability, cost efficiency, and security for multi-environment deployments.
Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) modules and pipelines (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) to provision networks, compute, storage, and managed services in a reproducible, auditable manner.
Design, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters and related platform components (EKS, GKE, AKS) including cluster lifecycle management, node autoscaling, multi-cluster networking, and cluster security hardening.
Lead the development and maintenance of CI/CD platforms and pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Argo CD) to automate build, test, and deployment workflows across microservices and monoliths.
Create and maintain platform-level observability: design logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Loki, and OpenTelemetry to provide actionable insights and SLA/SLO monitoring.
Implement and operationalize security and compliance controls in the platform: IAM policies, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), encryption at rest and in transit, vulnerability scanning, and automated drift detection.
Develop and enforce guardrails, policies, and platform abstractions (service catalogs, templates, operator patterns) that enable developer self-service while maintaining governance and cost control.
Automate operational runbooks and incident response playbooks, integrate on-call routing and escalation policies, and participate in root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews to drive reliability improvements.
Collaborate with application teams to design consistent deployment patterns and blueprints, provide platform APIs and SDKs, and onboard services onto the platform while reducing toil for developers.
Implement network architecture and connectivity patterns including VPC/VNet design, transit gateways, peering, VPN, service mesh, and hybrid/edge connectivity for secure and performant communications.
Manage cost optimization initiatives by providing visibility into cloud spending, implementing tagging, budgeting, reservation strategies, and right-sizing recommendations to minimize waste.
Design and operate platform bootstrap and onboarding experiences, including self-service provisioning portals, GitOps workflows, and documented templates to reduce platform adoption friction.
Create reusable CI/CD and IaC patterns for multi-tenant, multi-environment deployments including blue/green, canary, and progressive delivery strategies.
Integrate platform components with identity providers and SSO solutions (Okta, Azure AD) to centralize authentication and authorization across services and developer tooling.
Build automated testing and policy enforcement into the pipeline (unit, integration, security, and policy-as-code like Open Policy Agent) to shift-left security and compliance checks.
Implement service discovery, configuration management, and secrets injection strategies across environments to ensure consistent, secure, and reliable runtime behavior.
Lead platform migration initiatives from on-prem or legacy cloud architectures to modern cloud-native stacks, including lift-and-shift and refactor strategies, migration runbooks, and cutover planning.
Design backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans for platform services and critical workloads, validate recovery procedures, and maintain RTO/RPO metrics.
Evaluate, pilot, and recommend new cloud services, managed offerings, and third-party tools to continually improve platform capabilities, reduce operational overhead, and accelerate developer velocity.
Maintain clear, practical platform documentation, runbooks, onboarding guides, and training materials to empower teams and reduce support dependencies.
Implement enterprise observability and cost reporting dashboards to provide stakeholders clear metrics on reliability, performance, and spend.
Act as a hands-on technical leader in cross-functional initiatives, mentor junior engineers, and collaborate with security, networking, compliance, and product teams to align platform roadmaps with business goals.

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 platform usage analytics and onboarding metrics to product and engineering leadership to inform prioritization.
Participate in vendor selection, procurement, and contract evaluations for cloud services and platform tooling.
Run periodic platform health checks, cost reviews, and security audits to proactively remediate technical debt and compliance gaps.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Strong experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including core services such as compute, networking, storage, IAM, and managed databases.
Expertise in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) with experience building reusable modules, state management, and CI-driven provisioning workflows.
Deep knowledge of containerization and orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, Docker), cluster provisioning, and workload scheduling patterns.
Proficiency designing and operating CI/CD systems (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Argo CD) and implementing GitOps best practices.
Security-first mindset: experience with IAM, network security, secrets management (Vault, Secrets Manager), encryption, and compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI/DSS).
Observability and monitoring skills: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stacks, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, alerting rules, and SLO/SLA definition.
Scripting and programming proficiency (Python, Go, Bash) for automation, tooling, and custom integrations.
Networking fundamentals and cloud networking architecture experience: VPC/VNet design, subnets, routing, NAT, load balancers, and service meshes (Istio/Linkerd).
Experience with configuration management and automation tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) and CI-based test automation.
Experience with secret management, key management, and identity federation (OAuth, SAML, OIDC).
Familiarity with cost management and cloud financial operations (FinOps) principles, tagging strategies, and budget controls.
Experience with database provisioning and managed services (RDS, Cloud SQL, Cosmos DB, Bigtable) and operational considerations for backups and failover.
Knowledge of platform observability and security tools such as Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, Clair, Trivy, and vulnerability management pipelines.
Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud architectures and migration strategies.
Familiarity with service meshes, API gateways, and ingress controllers to manage microservice traffic and security.

Soft Skills

Strong written and verbal communication skills to present platform decisions, documentation, and runbooks to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Collaborative mindset and ability to work cross-functionally with product, security, networking, and application teams.
Problem-solving and analytical thinking with a bias for automation and reducing manual toil.
Ownership and accountability for platform SLAs, incidents, and continuous improvement initiatives.
Empathy toward developer experience and a focus on building intuitive self-service platforms that improve developer velocity.
Mentorship and coaching skills to grow engineering capabilities across the organization.
Adaptability and curiosity to evaluate new technologies and iterate platform design based on feedback and metrics.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related technical field OR equivalent practical experience in cloud and platform engineering roles.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, or related field OR advanced certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8+ years in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering roles; senior roles often require 5–10+ years.

Preferred:

Demonstrable experience designing and operating production cloud platforms at scale.
Proven track record of implementing IaC, Kubernetes, and automated CI/CD pipelines in medium to large organizations.
Experience driving platform roadmaps, cross-team enablement, and measurable improvements in developer productivity and system reliability.