Cloud Engineer
Design, build, and maintain cloud infrastructure. Work with Azure, AWS, or GCP to deploy scalable and reliable systems.
What a typical day looks like
Most days start at 9 with a quick standup. The team shares what they shipped yesterday, what they will do today, and any blockers. By 9:15 I am at my desk with coffee and Slack. The first hour is usually monitoring: I check dashboards in Grafana and CloudWatch for any overnight alerts, look at error rates, and review the AWS bill anomaly notifications. If nothing is on fire, I move to the day's main work — usually a Terraform pull request, a small infrastructure migration, or a security review. Around 11 I have a 1:1 with my manager. Lunch is at my desk most days while I read AWS blog posts or work on a side project. Afternoons are quieter and that is when I do deeper work — designing the next migration, writing runbooks, or pair-programming with a junior. By 5:30 I am usually done. If I am on-call that week, my phone stays close at night, but typically nothing happens.
Hour-by-hour
Skills you need
Required
Nice to have
Build these to stand out
Hands-on projects beat any CV bullet point. Pick one and finish it.
Multi-AZ Web App with Terraform
Deploy a simple Node.js app on AWS using EC2 Auto Scaling across 2 AZs, with an Application Load Balancer, RDS Multi-AZ database, and a Bastion host. Everything in Terraform. Public on GitHub with a clean README.
Shows you understand HA, VPCs, IaC, and basic CI/CD. Lots of recruiters will look at this.
Serverless Image Resizer
Upload an image to S3, Lambda triggers automatically, resizes the image to 3 sizes, saves them back to a different S3 bucket. Set up CloudFront in front. Add monitoring with CloudWatch alarms.
Demonstrates serverless thinking. Often used in interview questions.
Kubernetes Cluster on EKS
Provision an EKS cluster with Terraform. Deploy a microservices app (e.g. a simple ToDo app split into 3 services). Add Ingress, autoscaling, and Prometheus + Grafana for observability.
Shows you can operate Kubernetes end-to-end. Senior-level project.