Cloud engineers design, build, and maintain the infrastructure that runs modern software — compute instances, managed databases, container orchestration, networking, IAM policies, and the CI/CD pipelines that deploy it all. You'll work for tech companies building their own platforms, for enterprises migrating legacy systems to AWS or Azure, or for consultancies like Accenture or Thoughtworks. Most cloud engineers report to a platform engineering lead or infrastructure manager, and a typical week mixes Terraform deployments, troubleshooting production incidents, reviewing architecture proposals, and writing documentation that no one reads until something breaks.
Raj Mehta
Cloud Engineer
📍 London, UK✉️ raj.mehta@email.com
Summary
AWS Solutions Architect certified Cloud Engineer with 4 years of experience designing and managing scalable cloud infrastructure. Specialist in Terraform, Kubernetes, and serverless architectures. Reduced cloud costs by 35% through optimisation initiatives.
Work Experience
Cloud Engineer at RevolutMay 2022 — Present
Architect and maintain AWS infrastructure serving 35M+ customers across 30+ countries
Reduced monthly cloud spend by 35% ($180K/month savings) through Reserved Instances and Spot optimisation
Junior Cloud Engineer at ThoughtWorksSep 2020 — May 2022
Migrated legacy on-premise applications to AWS for 4 enterprise clients, reducing hosting costs by 40%
Implemented CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions and ArgoCD for automated deployments
Cloud Engineer CVs must show infrastructure scale, cost optimisation, and automation skills. Recruiters want to see your AWS/GCP/Azure certifications, the number of services managed, and cost savings achieved.
Listing cloud services without scale. "Used AWS" is meaningless. "Architected AWS infrastructure serving 35M+ customers with 99.99% uptime" shows capability.
Formatting Tips
One to two pages. Include a Technical Skills section grouped by Cloud, IaC, Orchestration, and Scripting. Lead with certifications. Quantify cost savings prominently.
Average Salary — Cloud Engineer
United States
$110,000 – $160,000
United Kingdom
$70,000 – $110,000
Germany
$72,000 – $108,000
UAE / Dubai
$70,000 – $110,000
Canada
$90,000 – $135,000
Australia
$95,000 – $140,000
Figures in USD. Ranges reflect mid-level experience (3–7 years). Senior roles and major metro areas typically sit at the top of these bands.
Top 5 Interview Questions — Cloud Engineer
1Walk me through how you'd architect a highly available web application on AWS from scratch.
Cover multi-AZ deployment, load balancing (ALB), Auto Scaling Groups, RDS Multi-AZ, CloudFront for CDN, and Route 53 failover. A strong answer also mentions cost implications and discusses the trade-off between redundancy and spend.
2How do you manage secrets and credentials in a cloud environment?
Mention AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault, IRSA or workload identity for pods, never hardcoding credentials, and rotation policies. This is a security hygiene question — answers that involve environment variables in plaintext configs will end interviews fast.
3Describe your approach to writing Terraform for a team, not just yourself.
Talk about module structure, remote state with locking, variable and output conventions, code review gates in CI, and documentation. Show you think about maintainability and onboarding, not just making it work.
4Tell me about a production incident you were involved in. What happened and what did you do?
Use a blameless post-mortem structure: what failed, how you detected it, what you did to restore service, what the root cause was, and what you changed permanently. Speed of diagnosis and communication during the incident matters as much as the fix.
5How do you approach cost optimisation in a cloud environment that's grown organically?
Describe your process: AWS Cost Explorer or equivalent, right-sizing compute, Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for predictable workloads, deleting unused resources, and tagging strategy for chargeback. Quote actual savings if you have them.
How to Tailor Your CV
AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure all hire cloud engineers and want their own certifications (Solutions Architect, Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Administrator) prominently listed. Fintech and financial services companies (Starling, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan) care about security posture, SOC 2 or PCI-DSS compliance experience, and audit trail implementation. SaaS companies at growth stage want Kubernetes expertise (EKS or GKE), GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux), and experience scaling infrastructure ahead of product growth. Consultancies want breadth — multi-cloud exposure, migration experience, and the ability to document and hand off cleanly to client teams.