Cloud / Infrastructure Engineer
Build the platform everything else runs on.
$78k–$100k entry · $150k+ senior
0 of 5 lessons completed
5 short lessons · drills · 11 interview questions
Role summary
Design, automate, and run the cloud environments that host a company's applications. They write infrastructure as code, build CI/CD pipelines, control access and networking, watch cost, and get paged when production breaks.
What this job does for businesses
Cloud engineers make software deliverable and durable. They cut deploy time from weeks to minutes, keep systems up when traffic spikes, and stop the cloud bill from quietly doubling. When they do it well, product teams ship faster without the company taking on hidden reliability or security debt.
- Turns deploys from risky events into routine
- Keeps uptime high and outages short
- Controls cloud spend before finance notices
Day-to-day responsibilities
- Review alerts and last night's deploys
- Write Terraform for a new environment
- Fix a broken CI/CD pipeline
- Tune autoscaling or right-size an instance
- Write the runbook for an incident you just closed
Skills
Tools
Salary & trajectory
$78k–$100k entry · $150k+ senior
What makes a standout
- Automates the thing they did twice by hand
- Talks about blast radius and rollback
- Writes runbooks and postmortems without blame
Real people in this path
Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, popularized 'everything fails all the time, design for it' — the mindset that separates cloud engineers from server babysitters.
Lessons
- 1
A Day in the Life
What the role actually does
- Automate infrastructure instead of clicking consoles
- Keep deploys fast and reversible
- Respond when production pages you
- 2
Cloud Building Blocks
Technical skills required
- Core compute, storage, network, and identity services
- Terraform or CloudFormation
- Containers, pipelines, and monitoring
- 3
Entry-Level Bar
What a new cloud engineer must know
- Comfortable in Linux and the command line
- Has deployed something real to AWS or Azure
- Understands least privilege and shared responsibility
- 4
Pay & Trajectory
Salary ranges and growth
- Entry base pay lands around $78k–$100k
- Senior cloud/DevOps engineers clear $150k+
- Path: cloud engineer, SRE, platform lead, architect
- 5
What Makes a Standout
Strong candidate signals
- Automates the thing they did twice by hand
- Talks about blast radius and rollback
- Writes runbooks and postmortems without blame