SENIOR CLOUD ENGINEER

Socket.dev; Sarasota (FL); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Socket.dev is seeking a Senior Cloud Engineer to lead cloud platform design, governance, and optimization. The role partners with security, networking, and application teams to deliver secure, resilient cloud solutions. You will drive standards, automation, and operate on-site five days per week.

You will architect hybrid and cloud environments, implement security controls, and support audits while mentoring staff and collaborating with vendors.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent hands-on experience in a technical field.
• Strong cloud engineering experience across security, governance, and compliance.
• Proven ability to design, implement, and optimize cloud platforms and services.

Responsibilities

• Lead the engineering and evolution of cloud platform capabilities across hybrid and cloud environments.
• Design for high availability, DR, backup, and resiliency with testing.
• Implement policy-as-code, guardrails, and cost-optimization initiatives.

Skills

Cloud architecture

Leadership

Security best practices

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/IT/Engineering

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Bicep/ARM

Job description

General Description:

The Senior Cloud Engineer is a key member of the infrastructure team responsible for leading the design, implementation, governance, and optimization of cloud platforms and services. This role partners across infrastructure, security, and application teams to deliver secure, resilient, and scalable cloud solutions. The Senior Cloud Engineer serves as an escalation point for complex cloud issues, drives standards and automation, and ensures cloud environments align with business, security, and compliance requirements. Must be able to work on-site five days per week.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

Cloud Architecture & Engineering Leadership

• Lead the engineering and evolution of cloud platform capabilities (compute, storage, networking, identity, and security services) across hybrid and cloud environments.
• Translate business and technical requirements into secure, scalable cloud designs; contribute to cloud reference architectures and patterns.
• Establish and maintain cloud engineering standards, guardrails, and best practices.

Platform Implementation, Operations & Reliability

• Engineer, deploy, and maintain cloud infrastructure and foundational services (e.g., subscriptions/accounts, landing zones, connectivity, DNS, IAM, logging/monitoring).
• Design for high availability, disaster recovery, backup, and resiliency; validate solutions through testing and operational readiness reviews.
• Serve as an escalation point for complex cloud incidents; perform root cause analysis and drive preventative improvements.

Security, Governance & Compliance

• Implement and maintain cloud security controls, including least-privilege access, conditional access, secrets management, encryption, segmentation, and secure connectivity.
• Partner with security and compliance teams to support audits, vulnerability remediation, and incident response as it pertains to cloud resources.
• Implement policy-as-code and configuration baselines to enforce governance and reduce drift.

Automation, Infrastructure as Code & CI/CD Enablement

• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for repeatable, auditable deployments (e.g., Terraform, Bicep/ARM, CloudFormation).
• Develop automation and self-service capabilities to reduce manual effort and improve delivery speed and consistency.
• Collaborate with DevOps and application teams to enable CI/CD pipelines, release patterns, and environment standardization.

Cloud Networking & Connectivity

• Engineer and support hybrid connectivity and cloud networking (e.g., VPN/ExpressRoute/Direct Connect equivalents, routing, firewalls, load balancing, WAF, private endpoints).
• Partner with Network Engineering and Security teams to ensure secure, performant, and resilient connectivity between on-premises, cloud, and SaaS services.

Observability, Performance & Cost Optimization (FinOps)

• Implement and tune monitoring, logging, and alerting for cloud workloads and shared services; define SLOs/SLAs where applicable.
• Analyze utilization and performance trends to improve reliability and efficiency.
• Lead cost optimization initiatives (rightsizing, reservations/savings plans, storage lifecycle, tagging/chargeback/showback practices).

Documentation, Mentorship & Vendor Collaboration

• Own and maintain cloud platform documentation, runbooks, architecture diagrams, and operational standards.
• Mentor Cloud Engineers and Infrastructure staff; provide technical leadership and knowledge transfer.
• Manage vendor and service provider escalations; evaluate new services and tooling for fit, risk, and cost.

Supplemental Information:

This job description has been prepared to indicate the general nature and level of the work that the employees perform within their classification. This description is not and cannot be interpreted as an inventory of all the duties, tasks, responsibilities, and qualifications required for the employees assigned to this job.

Education and / or Experience:

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related technical field is strongly preferred.
• Equivalent hands-on experience may be considered in lieu of a formal degree.