Cloud engineering, development & operations encompass a variety of roles. Whether you are trying to get your first job in the vast field of Cloud or you are trying to hire cloud professionals for your open positions, it is important to understand the different types of roles in the industry today.
Cloud focused job roles can be more or less grouped under the following five categories:
- Cloud Architecture
- Cloud Infrastructure Development
- Cloud Application Development
- Big Data in the Cloud
- Machine Learning
Let’s look at each category and the different job titles that are typical in that category
Cloud Architecture
Cloud Architect roles are responsible for making decisions about which cloud services to use, how to use them, enterprise or application patterns to adopt, making tradeoffs, considering organizational constraints, looking at the big picture of the solution, etc. These job roles are typically focused on a specific cloud.
Understanding job titles for Cloud Architecture
Typical cloud architecture job titles are Cloud Architect, AWS Architect, Azure Architect, GCP Architect
Cloud Infrastructure Development
Cloud infrastructure development involves setting up the framework and guardrails in the organization’s chosen cloud for developers to build and deploy their applications to the cloud. Setting up networking, security, landing zones & control towers are typical responsibilities in the family of these job roles
Understanding job titles for Cloud Infrastructure Development
The job titles for this role may sometimes mention infrastructure development but oftentimes, these jobs will carry the Architect title. When you see an architect job posting, it is important to understand the real intent and role in the posting. If the hiring manager is looking for primary skills such as infrastructure-as-code (IaC), CI/CD, terraform, networking, then they are probably looking for someone who is skilled in infrastructure development as opposed to architecting the solution
Cloud Application Development
Application Development in the cloud still uses one of the primary application programming languages – Java, .Net, python, node.js, etc. The expectation typically is that people in these roles are primarily developers with skills in specific programming language but beyond that, they are also able to understand and leverage the APIs and nuances of a particular cloud
Understanding job titles for Cloud Application Development
Job titles for these roles will typically carry “developer” or “engineer” keywords. But to distinguish the positions from non cloud developer positions, companies typically prepend the job title with the name of their preferred cloud or something just “cloud”. For example – AWS Developer, Azure Developer, Java Cloud Engineer, etc.
Big Data in the Cloud
Big data in the cloud related roles involve setting up and managing the big data processing setup of an organization. These roles help with setting up processes to ingest and process large amounts of data and provide outputs that are insightful or used by other processes. Most of the cloud providers have started offering higher level services for big data processing so accordingly, most of the jobs in this area are cloud specific even if the job titles don’t specifically mention so. When you see a related job posting, keep an eye on the “expected experience” section.
