Career guide

Cloud Engineer

Cloud engineers design, build and run the infrastructure a product lives on — compute, networking, storage and identity, expressed as code. The job sits between software engineering and operations: you write Terraform and pipelines more than you click consoles, and you are judged on uptime, cost and how fast other teams can ship on what you built.

2028L across 1 live listing6 core skillsInterview questions →

What the work actually is

  • Writing and reviewing infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi)
  • Designing VPCs, IAM boundaries and multi-account/landing-zone layouts
  • Building CI/CD paths for application teams and hardening them
  • Capacity, cost and reliability reviews — rightsizing, budgets, SLOs

The skills that get you hired

Core — expected at interview

AWS or GCP or AzureTerraformLinuxNetworking (VPC, DNS, TLS)CI/CDPython or Go scripting

Differentiators

KubernetesServerless patternsFinOpsMulti-region design

The path

  1. Cloud/DevOps Engineer0–3 yrsOwn pipelines and IaC modules; learn one cloud deeply, not three shallowly.
  2. Senior Cloud Engineer3–6 yrsOwn architecture for a product line; lead migrations and incident reviews.
  3. Staff / Cloud Architect6–10 yrsSet the platform standards other teams build on; cost and security posture.

Live Cloud Engineer jobs on ApplyJob