Hey all,
I'm looking for ways to break into Cloud Support Engineer roles. I'm curious to hear from Cloud Support Engineers how you got your start in that role? What was your career path that led up to the role?
Long story short I use enterprise support a lot and ended up asking one of the engineers how he liked his job. He said it’s fast paced but he likes how it’s always a different challenge/problem to solve. He said they are always hiring Cloud Support Engineers and that believe or not a lot of the folks on the team don’t even has AWS Certs. They just focus on or 1-2 key services.
I’m currently a Cloud Engineer and have some AWS Associate level certs. I’m starting to get a bit bored at my remote role, and I think every AWS user has had that dream of working for AWS. I have about 6 years of experience doing Data Science and Cloud.
I understand AWS is not remote friendly anymore but it looks like Austin TX is the closest office they have and I wouldn’t be opposed to moving there.
How is salary range and career progression?
I have been working as a devops engineer for small-medium company for less than 2 years now. I have no CS degree.
I currently hold: aws cloud practitioner, aws solutions architect - associate, ccna and cka certifications.
I know i want to be become solutions architect or possibly AWS systems dev engineer.
I recently did an interview with AWS for cloud support engineer role and they offered me a job. The pay is more or less the same but i am not entirely sure if switching from devops to cloud support role is the right decision in my career. I am hoping that maybe working for AWS can leverage my experience and skill sets in the cloud and move up internally. (Heard its easier to do so internally)
Need some advices…
Hi everyone,
I'm seeking advice on behalf of a friend who has received two job offers and is unsure which one to choose. Here are the details:
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AWS: The role is for a Cloud Support Engineer. It involves customer support, with performance metrics based on customer ratings and some high-pressure aspects. The compensation is competitive and includes stock options.
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IBM: The position is for a Sr. Cloud & AI Engineer. This role involves working on OpenShift for IBM Power Systems and offers opportunities to work on LLM and contribute to open-source projects. The pay is slightly higher than AWS, but it does not include stock options.
With his background in DevOps engineering, he's debating whether to go with the prestigious Amazon brand and stock options or the intriguing work and slightly higher pay at IBM.
Any insights or advice on which option might be better for his career growth and job satisfaction?
Thanks in advance!
I'm interviewing for a CSE position at AWS shortly and would really appreciate hearing any anecdotes from people who have worked there.
I'm interested in any information, such as pay range, work/life balance, company culture, day to day duties, and opportunities for advancement. Thanks!
Hello, just want your guys opinion and probably a question you guys get often about whether I should leave or not. This is my first job in tech apart from the one internship.
I love working with technologies like elasticsearch and kafka, other AWS stuff. I don't like working my current role though, which was supposed to be a technical job, it's becoming more and more like a call centre akin to customer support which a lot of the engineers in my company in the same role would agree. It is customer facing, which I don't quite like and the bad decisions made by senior leadership will not end and has already drove people away, such as time watching and micro-management. I've met some amazing people and I realise you can learn a lot of stuff here, the culture in the cloud supp org is what I would describe is toxic and much more incentive for managers who used to be good to be forced into the a list that you would find on the internet embodying bad leadership traits. I have only been working here for 9 months and I don't see it improving anytime soon, this year I will have to make a big decision whether I leave or not, in July there will be a cloud support -> software developer pipeline which I can apply to, and confirmation will be in August. This pipeline is not guaranteed, and much more senior cloud engineers will be prioritised, this honestly just seems like cope to me(which is a lot what senior leadership does here), but I have been genuinely miserable working this job, I don't know if it's worth the wait or should I quit now, I've always wanted to do SDE work, which is why I'm grinding leetcode a lot in work, and have money that can last me a year and accommodation with my parents pretty much forever. I fully well know the consequences of not finding a job for a long time, but the experience has just been not fun for me as cloud support though I have a great team and manager.
Editing for more context: Upward movement is slow, and internal switch can take years.
I get asked about AWS hiring process/experience frequently in DM's, so I figured I would create a post here with application > interview > offer timeline, Salary, Stock RSU, etc.
Application process:
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Applied March 16
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Passed Cloud Support Assessment March 28
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First interview April 7
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Received this on April 10:
Congratulations! You’ve successfully passed your Cloud Support Associate first-round interview, and we would like to invite you to do a final-round interview.
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2nd and 3rd interviews, back to back on April 21
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Job offer on April 26
Salary
Cloud Support Associate
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Base salary $76,680
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First year sign on bonus $14,000 lump sum
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Second year Sign on bonus $12,200 paid out monthly during second year
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RSU (Stock) $45,000 paid out : • 5% on the 15th day of the month in which you reach your first anniversary of employment • 15% on the 15th day of the month in which you reach your second anniversary of employment • 20% every six months thereafter, until fully vested.
Total comp for year 1 was around $92k plus or minus some depending on stock price when vested
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~$1,300 COL pay increase in April bringing base pay up to $78,000
If staying at CSA with no promotion, year 2 total comp is estimated to be around $98K (base, bonus, and RSU)
Promoted to Cloud Support Engineer I about 15 months in
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Base salary ~$98K (never got an official notice about pay increase, just base this on hourly rate for 52 weeks) In April, will likely get an official doc when review happens and any COL pay increase or RSU increase
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Still getting second year sign on bonus of about $1k per month, but that ends in July.
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July at second year anniversary will get 15% payout of RSU's
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December will get 20% payout of RSU
At current AMZN stock price my total comp for this year will be ~$128K if I sell the RSU's and the stock remains the same level until December. Note that when we get the RSU's they auto sell shares to cover the taxes which was 45%. So I only ended up with 55% of the RSU and that is still sitting as stocks In reality my total comp is really the $98k plus $6k in second year bonus = $104K as I am unlikely to divest the stock.
I will update in April after the review happens to see if they adjust in anyway. I am betting they will not since AMZN stock is pretty close to the all time high.
For interview questions, go to glassdoor https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Amazon-Cloud-Support-Associate-Interview-Questions-EI_IE6036.0,6_KO7,30.htm?filter.jobTitleFTS=Cloud+Support+Associate
They had the best amalgamation of basically all interview questions asked for CSA Cloud Support Associate. I doubt CSE I would vary much.
Feel free to ask any other questions.
hello all, got a call from aws herndon office that they are looking for a cloud support engineer role. i recently started working as a devops/cloud engineer role in another firm( have around 18months experience in aws). total IT experience is around 5 years .
Does any one have experience here on the role ? glassdoor reviews seems to be little harsh on aws and even amazon as a whole and for the role its mentioned like its mostly just customer support with no technical knowledge gain but i am not sure whether amazon will be ready to pay the amount that they are saying they will pay me to do just call center work.. totally confused !! any details will be helpful.. thanks in advance..
I was a CSE at AWS for almost 2 years. I'm still with AWS, but now I've moved onto another position. To respond to your points:
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Glassdoor reviews are harsh. Amazon is kind of love-hate. As someone who typically outperformed my peers at every other company I worked at, joining Amazon was a bit of a wakeup call for me. Suddenly I'm surrounded by people just as smart (or smarter) and equally motivated and passionate about technology. It's a very fast-paced work environment, and it's not for everyone. If you don't like to work hard (I worked 40 hour weeks, but I worked damn hard during those 40 hours) or if you bullshit your way in, you'll stand out like a sore thumb, and you'll hate working here. But if you love technology and are passionate about what you do, you'll be fine and love it here :)
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Call center? Yes, CSE role is pretty much a call center (chats and emails too). Except you're dealing with pretty smart engineers (AWS customers) on the other end of the call. There are some pressures to meet certain numbers and such, but what job doesn't have performance goals? You get to pick the AWS services that you like and you get to learn them inside-and-out and then help customers with them. Get good enough at the service and you can get internally certified for that service and start taking escalations (the really hard shit, but also really interesting). Get bored? Move onto a new set of services. Plenty to chose from and keep things interesting for a while. Another advantage is that there is no oncall or pager rotation as a CSE, which is pretty awesome. Once you go home, you're at home. Work never follows you home.
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The pay? Yeah, I loved my last job before Amazon and didn't really want to leave. I applied to Amazon for a dev-ops position thinking that they probably wouldn't offer me enough to make me swich, but why not try anyways. Was quite disappointed when they offered me CSE instead of the dev-ops role. However the pay was something I couldn't refuse, even knowing it was a call center.
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Knowledge gain is pretty good as a CSE if you want to focus your career on the cloud. The term "drinking from the fire hose" is thrown around quite a bit at Amazon because you learn a lot very fast. One year at Amazon feels like two or three years anywhere else with how much you learn and do. That said, it also very much depends on how much effort you put into it. If you really make the effort to soak in all the knowledge, you'll learn a lot and do great. Some people don't really care to learn, and they don't always do so well. There are lots of self-service training resources that you can take. Videos that teach you how things work. When I started, new-hire training was a 3 week boot camp where we learned a new AWS service each day. You get an AWS account that you can use to play around with any of the services (within reason) for free. Anyone who says you don't learn anything as a CSE didn't try.
I think that answers the points you brought up in your post. Just want to add that a call center role doesn't sound glamorous (it's not) or enjoyable (I didn't really enjoy it much TBH). But I do not regret it for an instant. I learned SOOO much about AWS while I was there and, for me, that alone more than made up for the negatives about the role. Plus, there are plenty of non-callcenter roles you can move to after you do your time as a CSE. Most people who want to move away from CSE (but stay at Amazon) usually do so within 1-2 years.
I would recommend it anyway
I got cooked on the interview I did last Friday. I don’t know if they changed the process, but my interviewer was grillin me and cookin me about a lot of cloud concepts and made me code - did you guys have the same experience?
Hello guys just got my first call back at aws and im really excited. Just wanted to ask if anyone had any tips for that specific role. i think its a L5 role im told so maybe it wont be as technical? but just want to give a brief overview of myself and what I currently know about the interview process before you give me advice.
ABOUT ME: Currently work in level 2 IT Support. doing hardware and software fixes and have been for like 5 years now so i have alot of customer support experience. I recently got my Cloud practioner cert and my solutions architect associate cert recently and am very proud of that because it took me ages to revise for due to struggling with ADHD but i had plenty of help from THIS SUB ;)
After getting those certs I did a few of Adrian Cantrils AWS projects such as; BGP highly avaliable site to site vpn connecting a hybrid on prem network to AWS, creating a serverless reminder notification app, creating a serverless event driven app, hosting a containerised web app with docker. I have also done some other projects with cloud tools like terraform (deploying a vpn and ec2's), Ansible(deploying a web app to multiple ec2's) and a python project where I used boto3 to make a basic image automation function. (cURRENTLY In the middle of creating a ci/cd pipeline with github actions with my mentor).
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT THE PROCESS: to my knowledge there will be like 5-6 interview that may be around 1 hour which kind of sounds daunting to me. I know the first interview process will be either "functional skills, technical aptitude and amazon leadership principles. would like some clarity on what all of those could entail to be honest. BUT yeah thats pretty much all I know.
My question to you was how can I prepare? what was your experience interviewing with aWS? What is the structure of interviews like? is the role im applying to more forgiving if im abit less technical?
I just have abit of anxiety about it all tbh and want to know how best to prepare!
I am currently in the final year of my college and just starting my journey towards a career in cloud computing. I hold an AWS Cloud Practitioner certification and am currently pursuing the Solutions Architect Associate certification. Additionally, I am learning Linux, Networking, Operating Systems, Python, and Containers.
I am planning to pursue a career as an AWS Cloud Support Engineer to kick-start my journey in the cloud domain. I have noticed entry-level positions for this role and am very interested. I am open to all kinds of advice and suggestions. If anyone working in this field could offer their guidance, I would greatly appreciate it.
Hello! I applied for this role recently and just got sent the online assessment. I've been trying to find more info on this particular role in terms of interview process and responsibilities but not much progress. Hoping to try my luck here!
Graduated with a BS in Information Systems(2020) with about a year of industry experience. Within that year I haven't been able to get a lot of hands on experience with networking equipment but was able to start my ccna course (in progress) and passed my sec+. I've looked at the minimum requirements for the aws position and I'm a bit overwhelmed with whether or not I qualify (imposter syndrome is huge). I've finally found my field that I'm interested in - cloud and networking but Im really feeling inadequate and ill-prepared for this lol.
So my questions:
How is the interview process formatted?
What can I expect from the technical questions?
What's the difference between responsibilities for cloud support eng vs cloud support eng with networking?
Appreciate any feedback!
Hey everyone!
Recently graduated with my bachelor's in networking and security. I also obtained my AWS SysOps certification and have been working at Help Desk Tier 3 for approximately 9 months. I have several other mom-and-pop shop experiences, roughly 2-3 years total, but I'll save you the headache.
I have a plethora of CompTIA certifications and my CCNA.
I've been wanting to transition to the cloud, primarily in the security realm of things, and finally got up the courage to send my resume to AWS for the above titled position. A few of my university mates also applied, though through the student assisted Cloud Support Associate program.
For those who have gone through the process: Help Desk to CSE, what would my chances be in locking down this position?
AWS has TechU program they usually take fresh graduates and then transition into regular role. You have much better credentials than a Cloud Support Engg typically has. Good luck.
Hi! You have a great background and experience for this. I have a few YouTube videos about how I prepared for my AWS interviews, they may help.