Career Advice

Read This If You’re Considering a Career in Cloud Computing

A complete career guide covering the roles and responsibilities, technical skills, general salary range, and relevant certifications

Arunn Thevapalan

• 6 min read
Read This If You’re Considering a Career in Cloud Computing

“I don’t want to waste time on cloud computing; I’m focussed on data science.”

These were literally my words to one of my friends when he suggested having skills around the cloud was becoming more important. How ignorant was I!

As we all know, the industry proved me wrong. Cloud skills are vital irrespective of your role if you’re (or aspiring to be) in the tech space. So I took a plunge at it and got myself Azure Certified.

Then, more recently, one of my mentees asked my opinion on a cloud-focused career. While I had some industry knowledge, I didn’t know what to expect in a cloud-focused career. So I took some time to research it from the Cloud Academy, Edureka, GCP, AWS, Azure, SimplyHired, and more.

During my research, I realized there’s a lot of roles that are super-specific to certain companies. The issue with this is, there is no point focusing on these roles as a beginner. Instead, you’d be better off learning the skills needed for more common roles that are available in most companies.

In this article, I’m going to list down 5 roles commonly available in most cloud-focused companies. But, not just that, let’s discuss the roles and responsibilities, skills required, the salary range, and how you can showcase yourself using certifications.

Let’s start, shall we?

1. Cloud Engineer

Cloud engineer is a beginner-friendly role that mainly revolves around being a cloud-focused software engineer.

They work mostly on writing code, writing and testing new features, shipping code for deployment, building mobile, web applications and API, and the day-to-day maintenance of ongoing software projects.

Technical skills

You need all the software engineering skills plus familiarity with at least one cloud platform, preferably the one the target company uses. To be more specific, Cloud Academy outlines them as:

  • Front-end: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, and Ruby
  • Backend: Golang, Node.js, Python, Ruby
  • Test-driven development, unit testing, and integration testing
  • Databases (both Relational and NoSQL)
  • Basic skills in software deployment
  • Linux internals, Servers, and cloud application development

Don’t be overwhelmed with all the skills; this is after research of multiple companies. Ideally, you’d need only one or two languages specific to the target company.

General salary range

Cloud engineers are well paid and, on average, earn more than traditional software engineers. According to SimplyHired, the average pay annually is $117,380 and can range from $78K to $175K based on your level of experience.

Relevant certifications

Certifications are popular in cloud computing and certainly showcases your cloud skills to the potential employer.

You don’t have to get yourself certified in all 3; one of them would give you some much-needed credibility.

2. Data Engineer

Data engineers are the gateway to business insights. They help build data architecture that collects and stores data and the analysis tools that enable stakeholders to understand the business better.

Please bear in mind that these are more likely to be there in more mature organizations. Data engineering could be your gateway to the data science world if you're coming from a software engineering background.

A data engineer is a beginner-friendly role, but you’re expected to have some specific skills.

Technical skills

You basically need to be comfortable with everything around databases — that’s your core skill. According to Cloud Academy, the skills required are:

  • Programming skills for communicating with different databases and software systems (Python or Java)
  • SQL, NoSQL
  • Data Warehousing and analysis tools
  • Hadoop, Spark, Storm, or Kafka
  • Infrastructure engineering
  • Extract-Transform-Load procedures
  • Cloud Providers and their associated services

General salary range

Data engineers are well paid and, on average, even earn more than cloud engineers. According to SimplyHired, the average pay annually is $123,465 and can range from $82K to $183K based on your level of experience.

Relevant certifications

Pick one of these 3 certifications to demonstrate your skills.

3. System Administrator

System administrators are the unsung heroes in organizations. They work behind the scenes to prevent any IT disasters from happening while ensuring their IT infrastructure is always up.

This is a crucial must-have role for every firm, but some outsource these roles to a third party. Now, in the context of the cloud, though this may mean automating cloud infrastructure, some programming to keep things together is needed.

Technical skills

The technical skills required are generally not taught in undergraduate computer science degrees. However, you can acquire these skills from specialized master's degrees, external certifications, or network-focused courses.

According to Cloud Academy, the skills required are:

  • Understanding different kinds of operating systems
  • Bash or shell scripting
  • Linux admin should know the major distribution families like Red Hat or Debian.
  • Windows admins should be equipped with Powershell
  • Virtualizations (e.g., VMWare)
  • Containers (e.g., Docker)
  • Configuration management (e.g., Ansible, Chef, or Puppet)

General salary range

System administrators are paid on average $80,890 annually, according to SimplyHired. However, it is worth noting that the pay varies from company to company based on the complexity of their systems and your level of experience from $50K to $130K.

Relevant certifications

Here are 4 certifications that would showcase your skills the best.

4. DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer understands the software development lifecycle and various automation tools for developing CI/ CD pipelines.

Edureka defines DevOps as a software development strategy that bridges the gap between the engineers and the IT team. However, roles are mostly vague because they vary from company to company, sometimes between teams within the same company.

Despite being the bridge, their core technical competency is building, deploying, and running software. As a beginner, this is an achievable role once you acquire the required technical skills.

Technical skills

The Cloud Academy outlines the common skills needed in the industry:

  • Choosing programming language: Golang, Ruby, Python, or Node.js
  • Linux shell scripting (BASH)
  • Capacity planning
  • Build, test and deploy pipelines
  • Production test infrastructure
  • Release engineering
  • Continuous delivery, deployment pipeline
  • Configuration management: Ansible, Chef, or Puppet
  • Monitoring, logging, and alerting infrastructure
  • Production issue diagnosis and resolution
  • Test-driven development
  • Container orchestration: Docker Swarm or Kubernetes

General salary range

Data engineers are well paid and, on average, even earn more than cloud engineers. According to SimplyHired, the average pay annually is $115,941 and can range from $80K to $168K based on your level of experience.

Relevant certifications

Pick one of these 3 certifications to demonstrate your skills.

5. Cloud Architect

A cloud architect is a person who drives the cloud transformation and is key to decisions involving the entire architecture of cloud systems.

The decisions taken by the Architect have a long-term impact on the course of the company; hence these seniors would often collaborate with the leadership as well as the technical team to account for the business needs and the technical feasibility.

In addition to an organization-wide transformation, they help architect every new project the technical team undertakes.

I wouldn’t recommend this for beginners; normally, you get promoted to the role once you have demonstrated the relevant technical skills on the job.

Technical skills

The Cloud Academy outlines the common skills needed in the industry:

  • Software Engineering: Programming, database design, testing approaches
  • Cloud Infrastructure: Thorough understanding of the selected platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
  • Tech debt management
  • Strong business domain knowledge to make key decisions

General salary range

Since a senior level of experience is required for this role, the compensation is the highest amongst all cloud-focused jobs. Some companies even push it further with bonuses and allowances.

According to SimplyHired, the average annual pay is $136,990 though it could fluctuate from $98K and go up to $190K annually. Definitely one of the best-paying jobs in the long run.

Relevant certifications

Pick one of these 3 certifications to demonstrate your skills.

These certifications are challenging and require hands-on practice, so I’d recommend using one of these cloud platforms and then think of attempting one of the certification exams.

Final Thoughts

There are obviously more specific roles in cloud computing, depending on the company you’re looking at. But most beginners are better off focusing on one of these common roles, which are available in most companies. The roles are:

  1. Software Engineer
  2. Data Engineer
  3. System Administrator
  4. DevOps Engineer
  5. Cloud Architect

Except for Cloud Architect — a senior position, where you probably will have to play one of the other roles before getting promoted, the rest of the roles are beginner-friendly.

I hope you got a good understanding of the roles and the expectations of the industry. I extensively write about my learnings and experiences from my data science journey on this platform. If you’ve got any questions, please feel free to reach out to me.

As most firms move to the cloud these days, the opportunities are endless. The real question is: will you make use of them?

For more helpful insights on breaking into data science, honest experiences, and learnings, consider joining my private list of email friends.