Career Possibilities in Cloud Computing
Broad paths, narrow scopes
Just like with any other major industry, cloud computing is a very broad term.
There are tons of different roles and niches you can find yourself in, depending on what skills you have and what you enjoy learning about and working with on a regular basis. I’d like to layout a few details about 5 different positions that are well established and in high demand by companies large and small.
The reason why is because many companies are starting to expand their IT departments for multiple reasons, and the cloud is rapidly becoming the IT industry. So if you can find yourself in one of these positions you can potentially find a job that is (mostly) fun, pays well, and has the option to work as remotely as you would like.
- Developer/Engineer
The typical “software engineering” role, in here you can expect to do things such as build out web/mobile apps, develop API’s, and write the code that will end up in your product or customer’s hands. You can also expect to collaborate with people from DevOps, system admins, and the like. On that note, with all of these positions, you can expect to collaborate with each other. It is extremely unhealthy and unproductive for a company’s different departments to work in their own “silo”, completely independent from one another and not communicating well.
Some common languages you could potentially work with are HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, or Golang. Your focus will most be on working with languages, libraries, and frameworks. You could also see database technologies such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Redis. Of course since this is a cloud engineer, you can expect to work with one or multiple popular cloud providers (and their similar services) like AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Average salaries range from $50–$70k for entry level, 70–90k for mid level, and 120k+ for senior level.
2. Data engineers
Data engineers build out business data for the planning stage of a company. In a general sense you can expect to be building out infrastructure to solve complex data problems and answer questions from that data.
Since you are working mostly with infrastructure, you should know a back end language like Python or Java. You should also be familiar with backend technologies as well, such as databases and data warehouses. Data warehousing in a nutshell is used for extremely large and complex queries and it is usually compatible with SQL databases. You will want to be familiar with ETL procedures as warehousing data needs to be cleaned and scrubbed. Common solutions for data warehousing you may come across are Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka.
Average salaries range from $50–$70k for entry level, 70–90k for mid level, and 120k+ for senior level, pretty close to what a developer/engineer should be.
3. Systems Administrator
A Sys admin’s primary job is to operate and monitor. You should be familiar with Windows and/or Linux administration and cloud infrastructure management. This could include resources encompassed in the compute, storage, database, and networking tiers. Depending on where you actually end up, you may also want to be familiar with containers and container orchestration.
You also want to know how to enable, capture, and analyze logs so that you can quickly pinpoint the source of any issues and provide a resolution. It would be helpful to know configuration languages like Chef and Puppet so you can automate many processes to keep things running smoothly and as expected.
Average salaries here are a little on the lower end (compared to other jobs on this list) from $50–$60k for entry level, 70–80k for mid level, and 90k+ for senior level.
4. DevOps Engineer
A DevOps engineer can be thought of as a utility player who has a job to make everyone else better, and make their life easier. You may find yourself bouncing around to help other areas so the knowledge base here is a little more broad. However what you will generally focus on the most is automating as many processes as you can. It is also likely you will be automating the management of infrastructure as well.
Popular programming languages you should be familiar with could include Golang, Ruby, or Python. In other words, languages that are used for scripting, testing, and automation. You will want to know how pipelines work so you can build, test, and deploy them. Basically, anything that is going to be released you should be able to test it to make sure it is as stable and bug free as possible.
You also want to be familiar with logging and monitoring so that when things do go wrong (because they will), you can analyze the logs and again determine where the issue resides and how to best resolve it.
Because the knowledge expected from a DevOps engineer is so robust, you will generally have healthier salaries to go with it. Entry level is around $65–75k, mid level is 100–120K, and senior can be north of 160k potentially.
5. Cloud Architect
An architect is generally the most senior level position, because you need to be able to make high level technical decisions that will be implemented down the line. If you decide on a poor stack for your business needs then you and many others will waste a lot of time and money building out a subpar architecture.
You should be able to get a solid understanding of a business’s needs and KPI’s so you can come up with the best possible technical solution. You should be quite familiar with software engineering and the process of creating, deploying, and testing applications and everything in between.
It is also very helpful to know how to manage debt being at a tech company, as many tech companies rely on properly leveraging debt to be successful. In this position, it helps to be less of a generalist and more of a specialist in a particular field. For example, you could specialize in tech solutions used by healthcare providers.
This position is the highest paid on this list, however the catch is that experience is generally required so there aren’t really any entry level positions. The average salary range you can expect to bring home is between $145–190k.
In the subtitle of this article I mentioned that these positions have broad paths with narrow scopes.
In each of the 5 positions listed above, there are more combinations of skills required, experience needed, and industries to work for than you would know what to do with. So the key is to find something that interests you and you are good at, and do that.
Hopefully this is helpful for you, as always best of luck on your continued journey through cloud computing.
