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£8,314/ monthEquivalent to £48 an hourWhat a AWS engineer does
An AWS engineer designs, builds, secures, and operates cloud infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. In a modern stack, AWS usually sits under application code, data platforms, CI/CD, observability, identity, networking, and incident response. The role touches VPC design, IAM, ECS or EKS, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, EventBridge, SQS, Terraform or AWS CDK v2, and production monitoring with CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, or third-party tools. A mid-level AWS engineer can provision services, debug common failures, and follow established patterns. A senior AWS engineer makes trade-offs explicit: multi-account strategy, blast radius, IAM boundaries, cost controls, deployment safety, data recovery, latency, compliance, and operational ownership. They know when not to use a managed service, how to migrate without downtime, and how to build platforms that application teams can use without becoming blocked by cloud complexity.
Typical responsibilities
- Design and maintain AWS account structure using AWS Organizations, IAM Identity Center, service control policies, permission boundaries, and least-privilege access patterns.
- Build and operate infrastructure as code with Terraform 1.x, OpenTofu 1.x, or AWS CDK v2, including reusable modules, policy checks, remote state, and safe promotion across environments.
- Deploy and support compute platforms such as ECS on Fargate, EKS, Lambda, EC2 Auto Scaling, and container image workflows using ECR and secure CI/CD pipelines.
- Implement production networking with VPCs, subnets, route tables, NAT gateways, VPC endpoints, Transit Gateway, private DNS, ALB/NLB, CloudFront, WAF, and certificate management.
- Own reliability practices including observability, alerting, runbooks, backup and restore, disaster recovery tests, incident response, and post-incident corrective work.
- Partner with application teams to improve performance, security, and cost behavior across RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, S3, ElastiCache, EventBridge, SQS, SNS, and Step Functions.
Must-have skills
- Strong hands-on AWS experience across IAM, VPC networking, compute, storage, managed databases, load balancing, DNS, and monitoring.
- Production infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform 1.x, OpenTofu 1.x, or AWS CDK v2, including module design, drift handling, state management, and review workflows.
- Practical container platform experience with ECS/Fargate or EKS, including image security, autoscaling, service discovery, rollout strategy, and troubleshooting.
- Clear understanding of AWS security fundamentals: IAM policies, roles, KMS, Secrets Manager, Security Hub, GuardDuty, CloudTrail, Config, and least-privilege design.
- Experience building CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, AWS CodePipeline, or similar, including deployment gates, rollbacks, and environment promotion.
- Operational experience with CloudWatch metrics/logs/alarms, X-Ray or OpenTelemetry tracing, incident response, SLO thinking, and production runbooks.
- Ability to explain architectural trade-offs around cost, resilience, latency, consistency, regional design, and managed service limits.
Nice to have
- Experience with multi-account landing zones using AWS Control Tower, Organizations, IAM Identity Center, SCPs, centralized logging, and shared networking.
- Kubernetes depth on EKS, including managed node groups, Karpenter, IRSA, EBS/EFS CSI drivers, ingress controllers, network policy, and cluster upgrades.
- Serverless architecture experience using Lambda with Python 3.12/3.13, Node.js 20/22, Java 21, EventBridge, SQS, Step Functions, and API Gateway.
- Data platform experience with Aurora, RDS Proxy, DynamoDB single-table design, Glue, Athena, Redshift, MSK, Kinesis, or Lake Formation.
- Policy-as-code and supply-chain security experience with OPA/Conftest, Checkov, tfsec, Snyk, Trivy, Sigstore, SBOMs, or AWS Inspector.
8 AWS interview questions that reveal real depth
These are the kinds of questions our engineers use in technical interviews. Each comes with what a strong answer sounds like.
Full set: 25 AWS questions by level, with red flags- Q1
Walk me through how you would design a production AWS account structure for a company with several engineering teams and regulated customer data.
Strong answer: A strong candidate starts with AWS Organizations, separate accounts for prod, staging, dev, security, logging, and shared services, then describes IAM Identity Center, SCPs, permission boundaries, centralized CloudTrail and Config, GuardDuty, and cross-account access. They discuss blast radius, auditability, network sharing, environment isolation, and how developers get enough access without broad administrator permissions.
- Q2
You inherit a large Terraform or CDK codebase with drift, slow plans, and unclear ownership. What do you do first?
Strong answer: A strong answer avoids rewriting everything immediately. They inventory state, identify critical stacks, lock down manual console changes, add ownership labels, standardize module patterns, and separate high-risk resources from frequently changed ones. They mention remote state security, plan review, import strategy, drift detection, and creating a migration path that does not block product teams.
- Q3
How would you choose between ECS on Fargate, EKS, Lambda, and EC2 for a new service?
Strong answer: A strong candidate compares operational burden, runtime model, deployment frequency, traffic shape, startup latency, networking needs, portability, and team skills. Lambda fits event-driven and bursty workloads with limits understood. ECS is simpler for containers. EKS makes sense when Kubernetes capabilities are already needed. EC2 is justified for special workloads, legacy software, or deep host control.
- Q4
A service behind an ALB has intermittent 502s during deployments. How would you investigate?
Strong answer: A strong answer checks target group health, deregistration delay, readiness behavior, container shutdown handling, deployment configuration, ALB access logs, application logs, and CloudWatch metrics. They look for mismatched health check paths, slow startup, connection draining issues, bad rolling update percentages, and dependency timeouts. They propose safer rollouts such as blue/green, canaries, and explicit readiness gates.
- Q5
Describe a secure pattern for secrets, encryption, and service-to-service access in AWS.
Strong answer: A strong candidate uses IAM roles instead of long-lived keys, Secrets Manager or SSM Parameter Store for secrets, KMS keys with scoped policies, rotation where practical, and no secrets in images or Terraform state. They cover IRSA for EKS, task roles for ECS, Lambda execution roles, VPC endpoints where useful, CloudTrail visibility, and least-privilege policies tested in CI.
- Q6
How do you design observability for a distributed AWS application?
Strong answer: A strong answer includes metrics, structured logs, traces, and business signals. They use CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, X-Ray where appropriate, log correlation IDs, alarms tied to user impact, and dashboards for operators rather than vanity charts. They mention SLOs, runbooks, high-cardinality pitfalls, sampling, retention, and verifying that alerts are actionable during incidents.
- Q7
What are common AWS cost problems you look for during architecture review?
Strong answer: Strong candidates mention NAT gateway data processing, cross-AZ and cross-region transfer, overprovisioned RDS or OpenSearch, unused EBS volumes and snapshots, excessive CloudWatch log retention, chatty Lambda-to-VPC patterns, unbounded DynamoDB or Kinesis usage, and EKS node waste. They recommend tagging, budgets and anomaly detection, right-sizing, lifecycle policies, and designing cost visibility into delivery workflows.
- Q8
How would you plan a zero-downtime migration from a self-managed database on EC2 to Aurora or RDS?
Strong answer: A strong answer covers schema compatibility, performance testing, parameter groups, backups, encryption, networking, and rollback. They propose replication using AWS DMS or native replication, rehearsed cutovers, read-only windows if needed, DNS or connection string strategy, application compatibility checks, and monitoring lag. They also validate restore procedures and avoid assuming the managed database removes all operational risk.
Senior AWS engineer job description
A ready-to-paste template. Or skip the posting entirely: send it to us as your brief and get a scored shortlist in 48 hours.
About the role We are hiring a Senior AWS Engineer to design, build, and operate production cloud infrastructure for remote product teams. You will work across networking, IAM, compute, databases, observability, and CI/CD. The role is hands-on and requires clear communication with application engineers and technical leaders. What you'll do Design AWS infrastructure using Terraform, OpenTofu, or AWS CDK v2. Build secure multi-account patterns with IAM, Organizations, CloudTrail, Config, and GuardDuty. Operate ECS, EKS, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, EventBridge, SQS, and related services. Improve deployment safety, monitoring, alerting, backups, and incident response. Review architecture for resilience, security, performance, and cost behavior. Document patterns that other engineers can use without constant cloud support. What you'll bring Strong production AWS experience, not only sandbox deployments. Deep understanding of VPC networking, IAM, KMS, load balancing, DNS, and managed databases. Experience with infrastructure as code and peer-reviewed delivery workflows. Practical troubleshooting skills across applications, containers, networks, and AWS service limits. Clear judgment about trade-offs, risks, and when to keep a design simple.
What you get with AWS
Pre-Vetted Expertise
Every AWS developer on OctogleHire passes a rigorous vetting process covering technical skills, communication, and problem-solving ability.
Start in Days, Not Months
Skip the lengthy recruitment cycle. Our AWS engineers are ready to integrate with your team and start delivering within days.
Up to 60% Cost Savings
Access world-class AWS talent at a fraction of the cost of local hires, without compromising on quality or experience.
Risk-Free Trial Period
Every AWS engagement starts with a trial period. If you're not completely satisfied, you pay nothing.
The engagement, as a spec sheet
How OctogleHire compares
Vetting
Resume screening only
Self-reported skills
5-stage technical vetting (1 in 25 pass rate)
Time to Hire
6–12 weeks
Weeks of filtering
48 hours to first match
Cost
$20K–$40K placement fees
Low rates, variable quality
40–60% less, no placement fee
Compliance
You manage it
You manage it
Fully managed (30+ countries)
Replacement
30–90 days (if any)
None
14–30 day replacement guarantee
Support
Account rep (9-5)
Ticket system
Dedicated account manager
“We in need of a handful of developers for our internal CRM build after speaking with multiple agencies and receiving some quotations we sat down with Yaseen from Octogle and we were pleasantly surprised to see what was available for us within their talent pool. we took on three developers saving upwards of circa £6000 per month and developing the software in record time exactly how we wanted it. Highly suggest anyone to use octogle hire if you’re looking for a cost-effective high-quality software development solution.”
Questions engineering leaders ask
Hire an AWS engineer when the work depends on AWS-specific architecture decisions: multi-account design, IAM, VPC networking, ECS, EKS, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudFront, and production operations. A general DevOps engineer may be enough for CI/CD and basic automation. The difference matters when outages, compliance, cost control, or platform design require deep AWS judgment.
Test real design and troubleshooting ability, not certification recall. Ask candidates to review an architecture, improve IAM boundaries, debug a failing deployment, reason about VPC routing, and explain Terraform or CDK state changes. Include operational scenarios: rollback, restore, incident response, service quotas, logging, and alerting. Strong candidates explain trade-offs and failure modes clearly.
Productivity depends on documentation, access, onboarding, and how fragmented the current AWS estate is. A strong engineer can contribute quickly if accounts, repositories, runbooks, and decision history are available. Expect early value from audits, fixes, and pipeline improvements. Larger platform changes require time to understand dependencies, risk, ownership, and deployment paths.
AWS is a good choice when your team already uses its managed services, tooling, marketplace integrations, or operational patterns. Azure can fit Microsoft-heavy environments. Google Cloud can fit data and Kubernetes-focused teams. The right choice depends on team experience, existing workloads, compliance needs, and service fit. Avoid switching clouds only because of preference; migration cost and operational risk are real.
Use freelance or contract AWS talent for migrations, audits, landing zones, CI/CD cleanup, security remediation, or temporary delivery gaps. Hire full-time when AWS platform ownership is ongoing and closely tied to product development. Many companies use both: a senior contractor to establish patterns and a permanent engineer or team to operate and evolve them.
A cloud architect usually owns high-level design, standards, and cross-team technical direction. An AWS engineer is expected to implement, automate, test, deploy, and operate the design. Senior AWS engineers often do both. For hiring, clarify whether you need diagrams and governance, hands-on Terraform and incident response, or someone who can bridge both responsibilities.
Look for written clarity, async decision-making, and disciplined change management. Remote AWS work requires clear pull requests, architecture notes, runbooks, incident updates, and handoff comments. Ask candidates to explain a past production change they coordinated remotely. Strong engineers make risk visible, document assumptions, and communicate before touching shared infrastructure.
Certifications can show baseline exposure, but they do not prove production judgment. Treat them as supporting evidence, not the hiring decision. A candidate without certifications may be stronger if they have operated real systems, handled incidents, designed secure accounts, and maintained infrastructure as code. Use scenario-based interviews and practical review exercises to validate depth.
You'll receive 3–5 vetted candidate profiles within 48 hours of your demo call. Most companies go from first intro to signed contract in under 5 business days — compared to 6–12 weeks with traditional agencies.
Every developer passes a 5-stage process: application screening, stack-specific technical assessment, live system design interview, soft-skills evaluation, and reference checks. From over 25,000 applicants reviewed, only 1,000 have been accepted into our network.
OctogleHire engineers start at £15/hr (about $19), with senior engineers at about £24/hr. That is roughly 50–65% less than the loaded cost of an equivalent in-house hire in the UK, US or Australia — a senior UK hire costs about £48/hr once employer costs are included. There are no upfront fees or placement commissions; you pay one published hourly rate once your engineer starts.
Every placement includes a risk-free replacement guarantee — 14 days on our On-Demand plan and 30 days on our Marketplace plan. If a developer doesn't meet your expectations, we'll find a replacement at no additional cost and manage the transition for you. Our replacement rate is under 6%.
Send the brief. Meet AWS engineers on Thursday.
Twenty minutes with an Octogle engineer, then three to five scored profiles inside 48 hours. Free to post, with a replacement guarantee on every placement.