Top 4 Cloud Computing Careers For 2024 | Salaries Included (UK and US)

You’ve probably heard that you can easily make 6 figures in the cloud industry, but are you getting the full story?

I’m going to walk you through some of the different technical cloud roles you can get, as well as what salary ranges you can expect for each role

I’m going to take it one step further, I am also going to break down the salary expectations based on experience, so what salary you should expect as a junior, mid-level and then as a senior engineer.

I know a lot of our audience are based in the US and the UK and so I am going to be providing the salary numbers based on both of these countries.

By the end of this episode you will not only know about the 4 main cloud careers you can have, but how much you can make at the different stages in your career, from entry level all the way to senior positions

But before we do that I want to give a quick disclaimer about salary ranges. The reality is that a lot of factors go into how much you get paid, for example what city you live in, as major cities pay better than smaller towns. Or how big the company recruiting you is, for example Google can afford to pay more than a small startup. So just bear these factors in mind when we talk about salary.

The first two roles we are going to talk about are the cloud engineer and Devops roles. The reason I am combining the two is because they have similar responsibilities and salary brackets;

They both focus on building, automating, and maintaining the cloud infrastructure of an organisation.

Cloud engineers focus on helping businesses migrate their infrastructure from on-premise data centres to the cloud; administrating the day to day management of the cloud environment; and ensuring that the cloud infrastructure is secure, scalable and reliable.

While devops engineers focus on creating pipelines, writing automations and generally streamlining deployment and troubleshooting processes

Now lets talk about how much they make

In the UK if you are entry level, you can expect to earn between £30,000 to £40,000 per year. Which is good for the UK because the average salary for all UK workers is about £33,000 so if you are able to get £30,000 for an entry level position you are doing quite well.

As you gain more experience and become more of a mid- level engineer then you can expect your salary to rise to between £45,000 to £60,000.

When you become a Senior Engineer you can expect to earn between £65,000 to £80,000. This seems to be the upper limit of how much a cloud engineer can make in the UK and to earn more you will need to transition to another role such as a Solution Architect, but we’ll get to that soon.

This data is confirmed by this Glassdoor report on cloud engineer salary ranges in the UK. As you can see it shows the low range to be £40,000, the Average or mid -level to be about £53,000 and the high range to be £71,000

While the UK is quite predictable and stable in the salary bands the US is a different story altogether

Entry level cloud engineers can expect to earn between $60,000 to $90,000 starting salary. The US is a big country and each city has different economics that influence the salary decision. 

As you move up to mid - level engineer position you can expect to earn between $90,000 to $130,000

When you become a Senior Cloud Engineer you can expect to earn between $130,000 to $160,000

While most of you might be familiar with the Cloud engineer job title you might be less familiar with the next role I am going to talk about, which is the Site Reliability Engineer or SRE role.

A site reliability engineer is simply someone that is responsible for making sure that a website or web application is always online and that the site is as performant as possible. For example in most organisations the site reliability engineer is the one responsible for making sure a website never goes down by proactively implementing, logging, monitoring and alerting on the system to make sure they can catch errors early and react quickly if the site does go down.

Site reliability engineers are in high demand and because of how critical the work they do is there are not too many entry level roles available, but if you are in the UK you can expect your first SRE job to pay between £50,000 to £65,000.

As you get more experience and become mid - level you can expect your salary to rise to between £70,000 to £85,000

And as you become more senior you can expect to earn £90,000+

In the US, as an SRE beginner you can expect to earn between $100k - 125k as a mid level you can expect between $130,000 to $150,000 and as a senior you can expect $160,000+

Now lets talk about one of the most popular roles in the cloud industry

This is one of the highest paid cloud roles as well as the roles most cloud beginners aim for

What role is this I hear you ask?

I am of course talking about the Solution Architect Role

A solution architect is responsible for making architectural decisions on what cloud services are used to solve business problems

This involved gathering and documenting the goal of the project, understanding the business needs and constraints; and making the best architectural decisions to meet the business goal in the most efficient way possible.

This position is not really accessible to cloud beginners as you need a minimum of three to five years of experience in the cloud industry to be considered for a Solution Architect position

But let’s talk money

In the UK you can expect to earn between £60,000 to £120k+ depending on your experience and in the US you can expect to earn between $70k and $160k+

Now that you understand the different cloud roles available and are ready to get that first cloud job.

Why not check us out at cloudcareermentor.com where you can learn how to create high quality cloud projects using technologies like AWS, Terraform, Git, CICD, Python and more using a proven learning plan to build up your cloud skills and make yourself more employable. You can get started by clicking here