Cloud Engineer

Cloud Engineer

Learning to think like a cloud engineer

I have not held a paid Cloud Engineer title yet. This page documents the cloud-related work I have completed, the environments I have practiced in, and the areas where I still need mentorship.
Honesty upgrade

Clear scope, upfront

What I have

  • Completed guided AWS internship lab exercises with documented troubleshooting notes.
  • Personal deployments on GitHub Pages and Render.
  • Documentation habits that track failures and fixes.

What I don’t have yet

  • Ownership of production AWS environments or multi-account architecture design.
  • On-call rotations or customer ticket ownership.
  • Enterprise-scale response ownership.

What I’m doing next

  • IAM policy drills and security review practice.
  • Terraform plan/apply reps in a sandbox account.
  • Small monitoring project with alerts + cost guardrails.
Current practice

What my 'cloud' reps actually look like

Internship practice (internal + lab-style)

  • Cloud Support Engineer Intern (Capstone Project) | Amazon Web Services | Seattle, WA | May 2025 - Aug 2025: completed guided support rotations in training environments with no customer data, producing internal-style documentation and repeatable troubleshooting notes.
  • Capstone: built a serverless metadata extraction workflow using AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3, with an accessible front end deployed via AWS Amplify.
  • Implemented a transparent cost model using measurable inputs to estimate cost per upload and retrieval, with documented assumptions for reproducible review.
  • Worked in guided rotations and lab-style environments; did not own production AWS accounts or independently resolve live customer tickets.

Personal deployments (public, small-scale)

  • Car-Match backend deployed to Render with README troubleshooting notes.
  • Interactive Pokédex and AnimalSounds deployed to GitHub Pages.
  • Free-tier cold starts can take several minutes; this limitation is documented in project READMEs.
  • Blog posts documenting how I configure budgets, monitor bills, and keep honesty logs of what’s broken.
Work samples

Proof (student-level, transparent)

AWS internship labs

  • Built CloudWatch dashboards + SNS alerts for sample environments (documented in internship recap post).
  • Automated repetitive lab support workflows using shell scripts and AWS CLI.
  • Capstone: metadata extraction workflow with a documented cost model for review.
  • Logged every limitation (no customer-facing tickets alone) so expectations stay realistic.

Proof links: Internship recap post

Portfolio prototypes

  • Car-Match repo shows env vars, README troubleshooting notes, and Render deployment notes.
  • Interactive Pokédex and AnimalSounds document GitHub Pages deployment steps.

Proof links: Car-Match repo, Interactive Pokédex repo, Interactive Pokédex live, AnimalSounds repo, AnimalSounds live

Tools I'm exploring

Stack in rotation (with AI help)

CloudWatch dashboards - lab + personalIAM basics + Access Analyzer - lab onlyS3 / Lambda - capstone project + labGitHub Actions - personal CI basicsDocker Compose - local dev onlyTerraform - tutorial stage

Each repository documents the maturity of the tools used. Experimental work is explicitly labeled in the project documentation.

Where I need help

Mentorship wishlist

  • Designing real multi-account AWS environments (beyond labs).
  • Deep dive into IAM policy design and security reviews.
  • Automated testing/validation for Terraform + deployment pipelines.
  • Incident response in real production settings.

If you are hiring for junior cloud roles and provide coaching in these areas, I am open to discussing opportunities.