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Cloud, DevOps & SRE

Cloud Operations Engineer

Operates and governs cloud workloads day to day: monitoring, cost and changes.

Experience level: IntermediateCoding level: MediumTechnical difficulty: 72/100

Operates and governs cloud workloads day to day: monitoring, cost and changes.

Entry

Intermediate

Coding

Medium

Key skills

Cloud operationsMonitoringCost managementTerraform
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Career overview

The Cloud Operations Engineer is the run counterpart of cloud engineering: keep workloads healthy, govern changes, control cost and automate the repetitive. The role bridges operations and cloud careers.

Main responsibilities

  • Operate and govern cloud workloads day to day
  • Track and optimise cloud spending
  • Monitor platform health, alerts and dashboards
  • Prepare and execute change requests in production
  • Automate recurring tasks with scripts
  • Lead incident resolution and post-mortem analysis
  • Describe infrastructure as code and version it
  • Keep technical documentation up to date
  • Follow capacity, performance and resource usage
  • Respect SLA response and resolution targets

Technical skills

Cloud operations85%
Monitoring80%
Cost management80%
Terraform75%
Linux70%
Scripting65%
IAM70%
ITIL60%

Technologies

AWSAzureTerraformCloudWatchGrafanaPrometheusPythonBashGitKubernetesDockerIAMS3LambdaServiceNowVault

Education level

Education requirements vary depending on the company, country and experience. Professional experience, certifications and technical skills can sometimes compensate for formal education.

High School / Bac

Less common

Bac+2 (2-year degree)

Less common

Bac+3 (Bachelor)

Common entry point

Bac+5 (Master / Engineering)

Common entry point

Experience & coding level

Experience level

Entry LevelJuniorIntermediateSeniorExpert

Coding level

No codingLowMediumHighVery High
Technical difficulty72%

Useful certifications

Certifications are never mandatory. They are one way among others to prove a skill.

  • AWS SysOps Administrator
  • Azure AZ-104
  • Terraform Associate

Where can this career take you?

Multiple paths are possible. Click a role to open its profile.

Direct progression

Cloud Operations EngineerSenior Cloud Engineer

Possible branches

Cloud Engineerfinops-engineer
Where Can Your IT Career Take You?

Where can you go next?

Realistic next career moves, with compatibility and a transition roadmap for each.

Cloud EngineerHigh

Overlap: 72% · Difficulty: Medium

Skills to learn: AWS / Azure / GCP, Containers

View roadmap
Senior Cloud EngineerMedium

Overlap: 35% · Difficulty: Medium

Skills to learn: AWS / Azure / GCP, Landing zones, Security

View roadmap

Where can you go from here?

A typical progression built from real career relationships. Click any role to open its profile.

  1. Cloud Support Engineer
  2. Cloud Operations Engineer
  3. Senior Cloud Engineer
  4. Cloud Architect
  5. Multi-Cloud Architect
  6. Enterprise Architect
Soft skills
  • Rigour and attention to detail
  • Problem solving
  • Sense of ownership
  • Clear communication
  • Organisation
  • Documentation writing
Common previous careers

Roles that frequently lead into this career.

Cloud Support EngineerMedium

Overlap: 53% · Difficulty: Easy

Skills to learn: Monitoring, Terraform, ITIL

View roadmap
Junior Cloud EngineerHigh

Overlap: 61% · Difficulty: Easy

Skills to learn: Cost management, ITIL

View roadmap

Related resources

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Next step

The path to Cloud Engineer

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A documented transition from this role to the next.

Cloud Operations EngineerCloud Engineer

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