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devops cloud engineer

title: Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Cloud Engineer
salary: $100,000 - $170,000
categories: [DevOps, Cloud, Engineering, SRE]
description: A comprehensive overview of the key responsibilities, required technical skills and professional background for the role of a DevOps Cloud Engineer.
Senior DevOps Cloud Engineer role: design, build, and operate secure, scalable,
cloud-native infrastructure using IaC, CI/CD, container orchestration, observability,
and automation. Ideal for candidates with hands-on AWS/Azure/GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform,
and strong scripting and security practices.

🎯 Role Definition

As a DevOps Cloud Engineer you will design, implement, and operate resilient cloud infrastructure and delivery pipelines that enable fast, safe, and repeatable software delivery. You will bridge development and operations by building automation, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), containerized deployments, and robust observability. This role requires a pragmatic engineer with experience across public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), Kubernetes, CI/CD systems, configuration management, security best practices, and collaboration with cross-functional product and platform teams.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator with cloud experience
  • Software Engineer or Backend Engineer interested in platform and infrastructure
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Build/Release Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior DevOps / Principal Cloud Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead or Manager
  • Cloud Platform Architect / Cloud Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineer
  • Security Engineer (Cloud Security)
  • Developer Productivity Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain production-grade infrastructure architectures on major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, or GCP), using infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates) to ensure repeatability, versioning, and testability of cloud resources.
  • Build, own, and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI) to automate build, test, and deployment workflows for microservices and serverless applications while enforcing quality gates and environment promotion strategies.
  • Architect and operate Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE, or self-managed) including cluster provisioning, multi-cluster strategy, pod scheduling, networking (CNI), and lifecycle upgrades with minimal disruption to running services.
  • Containerize applications and maintain Docker images and registries, define image promotion policies, scan images for vulnerabilities, and optimize container resource utilization and startup times.
  • Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) best practices, including modular reusable modules, remote state locking, automated plan/apply workflows, and peer-reviewed change control for infrastructure changes.
  • Automate repetitive operational tasks using robust scripts and tooling (Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell) and design idempotent automation that includes thorough logging, error handling, retries, and observability.
  • Design and enforce secure network and identity architectures in the cloud: VPC design, subnet segmentation, security groups, NACLs, IAM roles/policies, service accounts, and least-privilege access for both humans and services.
  • Implement and maintain comprehensive logging, monitoring, and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, ELK/Opensearch) to provide SLO/SLI/SLA visibility and actionable alerts for on-call responders.
  • Lead incident response and post-incident reviews: triage outages, runbooks, RCA, remediation plans, and automation to reduce mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to recovery (MTTR).
  • Implement cost management and optimization strategies for cloud spend, including rightsizing, reserved/spot instances, cost allocation tagging, automated scaling policies, and regular cost reviews with stakeholders.
  • Integrate security and compliance into the SDLC (DevSecOps) by automating security scans, policy-as-code (OPA, Sentinel), secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and continuous compliance checks.
  • Design and maintain service discovery, API gateways, ingress controllers, and load balancing strategies (ALB, NLB, Istio, Traefik) to support secure, performant traffic routing for microservices.
  • Implement GitOps workflows using tools like Argo CD or Flux to declaratively manage cluster state, rollbacks, and promote consistency between Git and runtime environments.
  • Collaborate with application teams to define deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, progressive delivery) and create safe rollout plans with automated health checks and telemetry-driven promotion.
  • Build and maintain platform-level developer tooling: self-service provisioning, templates, CLI helpers, and developer documentation to reduce cognitive load and accelerate delivery.
  • Manage configuration and secret management across environments using centralized solutions and robust access controls; enforce environment parity and secure rotation processes.
  • Create and maintain runbooks, playbooks, and on-call schedules; mentor engineers on runbook usage and ensure operational readiness for new services going into production.
  • Lead cross-functional design reviews and architecture discussions to align infrastructure decisions with business goals, compliance requirements, and long-term platform maintainability.
  • Evaluate and introduce new cloud-native technologies (serverless, managed services, service meshes, observability tools) where they can reduce operational burden and improve developer productivity.
  • Implement backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning for critical systems, including cross-region replication, recovery time objectives (RTO), and recovery point objectives (RPO).
  • Enforce change management and release governance for infrastructure changes: peer review, testing strategy, staged rollouts, and automatic rollback on failure.
  • Drive automation for environment provisioning (dev, test, staging, prod) to ensure consistent environments and repeatable infrastructure deployment across the organization.
  • Collaborate with security, compliance, and audit teams to prepare and maintain required evidence, perform vulnerability assessments, and remediate security findings in a prioritized manner.
  • Maintain, tune, and automate platform observability and metric collection to support business KPIs and developer SLAs, and support capacity planning exercises.

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 mentoring and knowledge transfer sessions for engineering teams on cloud best practices and secure deployment patterns.
  • Assist in vendor evaluation and procurement of cloud-related tooling and managed services.
  • Participate in on-call rotations and provide after-hours troubleshooting when necessary.
  • Document platform patterns, runbooks, and onboarding materials for new services and new team members.
  • Collect and publish operational metrics and dashboards to communicate platform health and trends to stakeholders.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong expertise with one or more public cloud providers: AWS (preferred), Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including compute, networking, storage, IAM, and managed services.
  • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration (EKS, AKS, GKE, or k8s upstream), including Helm charts, operators, and cluster lifecycle management.
  • Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or Azure ARM/Bicep with modular, tested modules and automated pipelines.
  • Deep understanding of CI/CD tooling and pipelines: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and pipeline-as-code patterns.
  • Experience with configuration management and automation tools: Ansible, Chef, or Puppet for system provisioning and orchestration.
  • Scripting and programming skills in Python, Go, Bash, or PowerShell for automation, tooling, and integrations.
  • Familiarity with service mesh technologies and ingress controllers (Istio, Linkerd, Envoy) and API gateway patterns.
  • Observability and logging stack experience: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/Opensearch, and distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin).
  • Expertise in container tooling: Docker, container image lifecycle, image scanning, and registry management (ECR, GCR, ACR).
  • Security and compliance tooling knowledge: Vault, KMS, IAM policy design, secrets management, vulnerability scanners, and policy-as-code (OPA, Sentinel).
  • Networking fundamentals and cloud-specific networking (VPCs, peering, private endpoints, service endpoints, VPN, Direct Connect/ExpressRoute).
  • Experience with databases and storage services in cloud (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Cloud SQL, Blob storage) and backup/restore strategies.
  • Familiarity with cost optimization and cloud governance: tagging strategies, budgets, cost allocation, and rightsizing.
  • GitOps and declarative deployment experience using Argo CD, Flux, or similar tooling.
  • Testing, release, and rollback strategies: canary deployments, feature flags, blue/green, and chaos engineering basics.

Soft Skills

  • Strong collaboration and communication skills: able to translate technical tradeoffs to business stakeholders and product teams.
  • Proactive troubleshooting mindset with strong analytical and problem-solving abilities under pressure.
  • Ability to mentor engineers, provide constructive feedback, and run technical workshops.
  • Strong ownership and accountability for production systems and platform reliability.
  • Prioritization and time management skills in a fast-paced, ambiguity-filled environment.
  • Continuous learning mindset: stays current with cloud-native trends and brings pragmatic improvements.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Cloud Computing, or related technical field.
  • Cloud certifications such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, or Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8+ years in cloud engineering, DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering roles.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years building and operating production cloud infrastructure and delivery pipelines.
  • Demonstrable experience leading automation initiatives, migrating monoliths to cloud-native architectures, and implementing secure, scalable platform services.
  • Experience working in Agile environments and collaborating closely with development teams, product managers, and security/compliance teams.
  • Proven track record of driving reliability improvements, reducing incident frequency, and delivering measurable cost optimizations.
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