Cloud engineer
Design, build and operate cloud-based infrastructure on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Salary
Cited figures only: median full-time weekly earnings for the ANZSCO unit group Computer Network Professionals (2631) from Your Career (Jobs and Skills Australia), and where available the QILT graduate starting salary for the matching study area.
| Figure | AUD | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Median full-time weekly earnings | $2308 | Your Career (2026-09-23) |
Jobs, demand and who does this work
Figures for the ANZSCO occupation Computer Network and Systems Engineer (263111), the closest official match for cloud engineer, from Your Career (Jobs and Skills Australia data, sourced 2026-09-23).
- People employed
- 14,500
- Future demand
- Strong
- Work full-time
- 93%
- Average full-time hours
- 41 a week
- Women
- 8%
- Median age
- 40
Where the jobs are (share of workers)
| NSW | 36% |
| VIC | 27.8% |
| QLD | 13.5% |
| WA | 9.1% |
| SA | 6% |
| TAS | 0.8% |
| ACT | 6% |
| NT | 0.8% |
Highest qualification held by workers
| Postgraduate qualification | 21.8% |
| Bachelor degree | 40.4% |
| Diploma or advanced diploma | 14.8% |
| Certificate I-IV | 7.4% |
| Year 12 | 8.7% |
| Below Year 12 | 1.8% |
What a cloud engineer actually does
Cloud engineers spend most of the day in a terminal, an IDE and a browser tab full of cloud consoles. Mornings usually start with a stand-up, a scan of overnight alerts from CloudWatch, Azure Monitor or Datadog, and triage of anything that paged on-call. From there the work splits between shipping infrastructure-as-code changes (Terraform, Bicep or Pulumi), reviewing other engineers' pull requests, and partnering with developers on deployment pipelines. Afternoons often go to longer-horizon work: designing a new VPC layout, tightening IAM policies after a security review, or running cost-optimisation passes against the latest bill. Most teams run hybrid with 2-3 office days; fully remote is common at cloud-native shops. Hours are typically 38-45 per week, with an on-call rotation that can mean evening or weekend pages once every few weeks.
Typical tasks
- Design and provision cloud architectures as code.
- Run platform operations and on-call.
- Tune cost and reliability of running services.
Skills you'll use
- Linux command line and shell scripting
- Infrastructure as code with Terraform or Bicep
- One major cloud platform in depth (AWS, Azure or GCP)
- Networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, VPCs)
- Containers and orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes
- CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions, GitLab or Azure DevOps
- Python or Go for automation and small services
- Reading cloud bills and reasoning about cost drivers
- Writing runbooks and incident post-mortems
How to become one
- 1Finish Year 12 with English and Maths Advanced or Methods (Maths Standard limits some uni options)
- 2Complete a 3-year Bachelor of Information Technology, Computer Science, or Software Engineering. A double with maths or commerce helps for fintech and data-heavy employers
- 3Build a public portfolio: a personal site hosted on AWS or Azure, a Terraform repo on GitHub, and 1-2 cloud certifications (AWS Solutions Architect Associate is the standard entry cert)
- 4Land a graduate role in platform engineering, DevOps, or general software development, or start at an MSP doing cloud migrations for SME clients
- 5Spend the first 2-3 years rotating through compute, networking, security and CI/CD work. Aim for an associate-level cert in your primary cloud
- 6Move into a senior cloud or platform engineering role around the 4-6 year mark, and start specialising (security, FinOps, Kubernetes, data platforms)
Where you can work
- Big four banks and other ASX-listed financial services firms
- Federal and state government digital service teams
- Telcos and large retailers running internal platforms
- Consultancies and managed service providers running client cloud estates
- Cloud-native scale-ups and SaaS product companies
- The Australian arms of the major cloud vendors and their partner network
Career progression
Typical stages and roles. Years of experience are a rough guide; pay at each stage depends on the employer, award or agreement.
- Graduate0-2 yearsTypical roles: Graduate cloud engineer, Junior DevOps engineer, Associate platform engineer
- Mid-level3-5 yearsTypical roles: Cloud engineer, DevOps engineer, Site reliability engineer
- Senior6-9 yearsTypical roles: Senior cloud engineer, Senior SRE, Senior platform engineer
- Lead or principal10+ yearsTypical roles: Lead cloud architect, Principal platform engineer, Head of platform
Is this for you?
You might love this if
- You like designing systems and reasoning about how parts fail
- You can stay calm and methodical when production is down at 2am
- You enjoy automating boring tasks rather than doing them by hand
- You read documentation properly before guessing
- You can explain a tricky technical trade-off to a non-technical manager
This might not suit you if
- You never want to carry an on-call pager
- You dislike the constant churn of new services, new tools and new pricing models
- You want to work mainly with people rather than systems
- You hate writing documentation or post-incident reports
Ways in
Uni and TAFE routes for cloud engineer. We only list pathways that actually lead to this occupation.
University
Bachelor degrees that lead to this career.
TAFE / VET
Nationally accredited Certificate and Diploma qualifications.
No direct TAFE pathway to this career.
Sources
ExamExplained does not publish predictive salary figures. For current Australian earnings data check Your Career (yourcareer.gov.au) directly. Career classifications follow the ABS ANZSCO 2022 release.