I spoke with colleagues at OVHcloud (Marc Pujol, the Training Officer at OVHcloud UK; Bastien Verdebout, Product Manager, OVHcloud France), and asked them what skills a startup needs to employ to implement and manage their cloud strategy, and summarised our discussion into a job spec, which you can copy and paste as needed.

Title: Cloud Engineer/CTO

Main Responsibilities: Seamlessly mesh tech know-how with business acumen to help us navigate all our cloud computing needs, including infrastructure design, maintenance, support and planning, and everything in between. Implement and maintain cloud and infrastructure components (server, storage, network, data, and applications) to deliver these end-to-end cloud infrastructure architectures.

Specific Duties:

1. Research the best cloud strategy that aligns with the needs of the company and customers, with input from the team and customers, and communicate it to the team.
2. Planning, designing, developing and deploying cloud-based applications.
3. Managing cloud environments in accordance with company security guidelines.
4. Setting up virtual servers and storage instances on the cloud platform of choice, with the necessary quality of service, backup and redundancy and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection.
5. Building and designing web services in the cloud, along with implementing geographically redundant services.
6. Manage infrastructure automation through DevOps scripting (e.g. Shell, Powershell, Ansible, Terraform etc.).
7. Configuration management, using Chef or Puppet (for example).
8. Educating teams on the implementation of new cloud-based initiatives, providing relevant training as required.
9. Lead and develop best practices for the larger engineering team.

Skills Required:

1. Cloud Service Provider/VMware/OpenStack Solutions Architect Certified
2. Five years’ experience in developing software, using languages such as Java, Python, C++ or Ruby
3. Hands-on experience in migration of business software at scale to datacentres or the cloud
4. Experience in performance optimisation techniques.
5. Experience with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications and cloud-based services.
6. Sysadmin skills including Linux, Windows administration.
7. DevOps skills including usage of OpenStack, Docker/Kubernetes and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) APIs.
8. Database experience, including knowledge of SQL and NoSQL, and related data stores, such as Postgres.
9. Storage solutions experience, including block and object storage.
10. Extensive experience with open-source technology, software development and system engineering.

Role Requirements:

1. Bachelor’s degree in Information Science/Information Technology, Computer Science or Engineering.
2. Good understanding of enterprise networks, security and identity access management.
3. Three to five years’ experience in a Cloud Engineer role, or related position.
4. Excellent communication and organisational skills, and the ability to engage with customers to gain insights to align product development with customer needs.
5. Previous experience managing a team.
6. Previous experience setting up infrastructure.
7. Open-mindedness.

Free Webinar: If you are looking for more insight into what skills your startup needs to maximise your cloud experience, please attend our webinar on 21 May 2020 by registering here.