CECloud Computing Engineer
CE
Career

Cloud Computing Engineer

By the numbers
Typical pay
$116,580 / yr
Education to start
Bachelor's degree
Future demand
+8.2% by 2034
People in this job
435K
Figures shown for ·closest of 3 O*NET occupations
The work
A day, hour by hour
08:30
Alerts & overnight triage

Scan monitoring dashboards for anything that fired while you slept.

09:00
Standup & triage

Sync with the team. Flag the one thing that's actually on fire.

09:20
Infrastructure code

Write Terraform to spin up new environments — no clicking, just code.

11:30
Cost review

Cloud bill spiked 18% — idle dev clusters are the culprit. Kill them.

13:00
Incident response

Production API is slow. Trace it to a misconfigured load balancer. Fix it.

14:30
Security audit

Tighten IAM roles — three accounts have way more access than they need.

15:30
Migration planning

Decide: phase the legacy database move in slowly, not all at once.

16:30
Alert tuning & handoff

Set smarter thresholds so 2 a.m. pages only fire when it actually matters.

Things you do
  • Architect cloud systems that keep apps fast, cheap, and always online.
  • Write code to automatically spin up servers and storage on demand.
  • Migrate a company's old servers into the cloud with minimal downtime.
  • Package apps into containers so they run the same everywhere.
  • Hunt down the cause of an outage and get systems back online fast.
Decisions you’ll make
  • Should I build this myself in the cloud, or just use a managed service?
  • Is this spike in cloud costs a real problem, or just expected growth?
  • Do I fix this outage fast with a messy workaround, or take time to do it right?
  • Is our current setup secure enough, or am I leaving us exposed?
  • Should I migrate everything to the new platform now, or phase it in slowly?
Education Pathways · how you get there
60 in 100 went the college route · 40 in 100 found another way in None, typically
Education mapped from O*NET:
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