Senior Cloud Engineer: Job Description
Employment Type: Contract W2 only
Experience: 10+ years in IT, with at least 5+ years in cloud engineering
About the Role
We are looking for a Senior Cloud Engineer to design, build, and operate secure, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud infrastructure. You will be a technical leader on the team, setting standards for architecture and automation, mentoring engineers, and partnering with development, security, and operations teams to deliver reliable platforms at scale.
Key Responsibilities
Architecture and Design
- Design and implement highly available, fault-tolerant, multi-region cloud architectures on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform
- Lead cloud migration and modernization initiatives, including lift-and-shift, re-platforming, and re-architecting to cloud-native services
- Define reference architectures, landing zones, and best practices for the organization
- Evaluate new cloud services and recommend adoption based on technical and business fit
Automation and Infrastructure as Code
- Build and maintain infrastructure using Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, or Pulumi
- Develop and improve CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, ArgoCD)
- Automate provisioning, configuration, patching, and operational tasks using Python, Bash, or PowerShell
Containers and Platform Engineering
- Design, deploy, and manage Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE) and containerized workloads
- Implement service mesh, ingress, autoscaling, and workload-optimization strategies
- Support developer self-service through internal platforms and golden paths
Security and Compliance
- Implement cloud security best practices: IAM, network segmentation, encryption, secrets management, and zero-trust principles
- Partner with security teams on vulnerability management, audits, and compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR as applicable)
- Enforce policy-as-code and guardrails (OPA, AWS Config, Azure Policy)
Reliability and Operations
- Own observability: monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, ELK, OpenTelemetry)
- Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets; drive incident response, root cause analysis, and postmortems
- Design and test disaster recovery and backup strategies
- Participate in on-call rotation for critical production systems
Cost Optimization (FinOps)
- Monitor and optimize cloud spend through right-sizing, reserved capacity, and savings plans
- Implement tagging, budgeting, and cost-visibility practices
Leadership and Collaboration
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers; conduct design and code reviews
- Collaborate with product, engineering, and security stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions
- Produce clear documentation, runbooks, and architecture decision records (ADRs)
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of overall IT experience, including 5+ years hands-on with public cloud platforms
- Deep expertise in at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform); working knowledge of a second
- Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred)
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker in production
- Solid understanding of networking: VPC/VNet design, DNS, load balancing, VPN, Direct Connect/ExpressRoute, firewalls
- Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language (Python, Go, or Bash)
- Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
- Strong knowledge of IAM, security best practices, and compliance frameworks
- Experience with monitoring and observability tooling
- Proven track record of leading complex cloud projects end to end
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
