What is a Cloud Engineer?
A cloud engineer designs, builds, and manages a company's cloud infrastructure — the servers, networks, databases, storage, and managed services that power the product in production. Cloud engineers work at the IaaS/PaaS layer: they're experts in AWS, GCP, or Azure and use infrastructure-as-code to manage environments reproducibly, securely, and cost-efficiently. At a startup, cloud engineers are often the difference between infrastructure that scales gracefully and infrastructure that breaks under load.
At what stage should you hire a Cloud Engineer?
Series A and beyond, when the cloud infrastructure has grown complex enough that managing it ad hoc is creating risk or cost inefficiency. The signal: your cloud costs are growing faster than your revenue, or engineers are spending time fixing infrastructure problems that a cloud expert would have anticipated and prevented.
Common titles for this role
- Cloud Engineer
- Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
- AWS Engineer
- GCP Engineer
- Cloud Architect
- Infrastructure Engineer
What does a Cloud Engineer do at a startup?
- Design and manage cloud architecture: VPCs, subnets, routing, load balancers, CDN
- Implement infrastructure as code: Terraform, Pulumi, or AWS CDK for all cloud resources
- Manage container orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS) or managed container services
- Implement cloud security: IAM, security groups, KMS, secrets management
- Optimize cloud costs: right-sizing, reserved instances, savings plans, spot instances
- Design multi-region or multi-AZ architectures for high availability
- Manage databases and storage: RDS, DynamoDB, S3, and backup/recovery policies
Key skills and qualifications
- Deep expertise in at least one major cloud platform: AWS (most common at startups), GCP, or Azure
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform required; Pulumi or CDK as additional
- Container orchestration: Kubernetes in a managed cloud context
- Network fundamentals: VPC design, routing, DNS, load balancing
- Security: IAM policies, encryption, compliance controls
- Cloud cost optimization experience — has reduced a cloud bill meaningfully
Why hire your Cloud Engineer through RFS?
- Cloud engineering is a specialized search — we screen for hands-on IaC and cloud architecture experience, not just cloud familiarity
- 29-day average time to hire — infrastructure searches move faster with our pre-vetted candidate pool
- 300+ placements at VC-backed companies across engineering and infrastructure functions
- Pre-vetted for cloud certifications, IaC depth, and production infrastructure experience at scale
- No upfront fees
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