Building a cloud engineering team from the ground up is one of the highest-stakes hiring challenges an organization can face. The decisions you make in the first 6-12 months — who to hire, in what order, and how to structure the team — compound over years. A strong foundation accelerates everything that follows. A weak one creates technical debt, cultural problems, and scaling challenges that become increasingly expensive to fix.
This guide provides a practical framework for organizations that are ready to invest in dedicated cloud engineering capability, whether you are migrating from on-premises infrastructure, expanding your existing cloud footprint, or building cloud-native products from scratch.
Before You Hire: Define the Mission
The most common mistake organizations make when building a cloud team is hiring before they have clearly defined what the team is responsible for. “Cloud engineering” is broad enough to encompass infrastructure management, platform engineering, DevOps, site reliability, security, and cost optimization. If you do not define the team’s scope before you start hiring, you will hire generalists when you need specialists (or vice versa), and the team’s identity and priorities will remain unclear.
Questions to Answer First
- What is the primary business driver? Are you migrating existing workloads to the cloud, building new cloud-native applications, or optimizing an existing cloud environment?
- What cloud platform(s) will you use? Focusing on a single platform (Azure, AWS, or GCP) simplifies hiring. Multi-cloud strategies require broader skill sets and are harder to staff. For guidance on choosing between cloud platforms, see our comparison guide.
- What is the team’s relationship to application development? Will the cloud team build and manage the platform that application developers deploy on, or will cloud engineers be embedded in application teams?
- What is your timeline? A 6-month migration has very different staffing needs than a multi-year platform build.
- What existing skills do you have? Do you have infrastructure engineers who can transition to cloud, or are you starting with no internal cloud expertise?
The answers to these questions determine your team structure, your hiring priorities, and the skill profiles you need to recruit.
Team Structure Options
There is no universal “right” team structure for cloud engineering. The best structure depends on your organization’s size, goals, and operating model.
Centralized Cloud Team
A single cloud engineering team that serves the entire organization. This team owns the cloud platform, infrastructure, and shared services (networking, identity, monitoring, CI/CD). Application teams request infrastructure through the cloud team.
Best for: Organizations in the early stages of cloud adoption (pre-migration or early migration), where establishing consistent standards, governance, and architecture is the top priority.
Advantages: Consistent standards across the organization, efficient use of scarce cloud expertise, clear ownership of infrastructure.
Challenges: Can become a bottleneck as the organization scales. Application teams may feel dependent on the cloud team’s capacity and priorities.
Embedded Cloud Engineers
Cloud engineers are embedded directly in application or product teams. Each team has its own cloud expertise and manages its own infrastructure, with lightweight central governance.
Best for: Cloud-native organizations with mature DevOps practices, where each team owns its full stack from code to production.
Advantages: Faster delivery (no handoffs to a central team), stronger alignment between infrastructure and application needs.
Challenges: Inconsistent practices across teams, duplicated effort, harder to maintain security and compliance standards.
Platform Team Model
A hybrid approach where a central platform team builds and maintains a self-service internal platform (think: templates, pipelines, guardrails, and shared services), and application teams consume the platform independently.
Best for: Mid-to-large organizations that need both consistency and developer velocity. This model is becoming the dominant pattern for organizations at scale.
Advantages: Combines central governance with team autonomy. The platform team encodes best practices into reusable components, reducing the need for cloud expertise on every application team.
Challenges: Requires strong product management skills on the platform team. The platform must be genuinely useful, or teams will route around it.
Who to Hire First: The Critical First Three Roles
The order in which you build your team matters more than most organizations realize. Your first hires set the technical direction, establish the culture, and make the architectural decisions that everyone after them will inherit.
Role 1: Senior Cloud/Infrastructure Engineer (The Technical Anchor)
Your first hire should be your strongest technical contributor — a senior engineer with deep, hands-on experience in your chosen cloud platform. This person will make the foundational architectural decisions, establish infrastructure-as-code patterns, and set the technical standard for everyone who follows.
What to look for:
- 5+ years of hands-on cloud infrastructure experience (not just certifications)
- Deep expertise in your primary platform (Azure, AWS, or GCP)
- Strong infrastructure-as-code skills (Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation)
- Experience designing network architectures, identity/access management, and security controls
- Ability to work independently with minimal oversight — this person will have significant autonomy early on
This role is the hardest to fill and the most important to get right. A bad first hire at this level creates architectural and cultural debt that compounds for years. Take the time to vet thoroughly, and consider working with a recruiting partner that specializes in cloud engineering to access a pre-vetted pool of senior talent.
Role 2: DevOps / CI-CD Engineer (The Automation Builder)
Your second hire should focus on automation, deployment pipelines, and developer experience. While your first hire is establishing the infrastructure foundation, this person builds the systems that enable the rest of the organization to deploy on that foundation efficiently.
What to look for:
- Strong CI/CD pipeline experience (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins)
- Containerization and orchestration skills (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Scripting proficiency (Python, Bash, PowerShell)
- Experience with monitoring and observability tools
- A developer-experience mindset — this person builds tools that other engineers use daily
For more context on hiring DevOps engineers and the timelines involved, see our dedicated guide.
Role 3: Cloud Security / Compliance Engineer (The Guardrail Builder)
Your third hire should own security and compliance for the cloud environment. This is especially critical if your organization handles sensitive data or operates in a regulated industry (healthcare, finance, government). Learn more about security and compliance requirements that affect cloud environments.
What to look for:
- Experience implementing cloud security controls (network segmentation, identity management, encryption, logging)
- Knowledge of compliance frameworks relevant to your industry (SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, PCI-DSS)
- Policy-as-code experience (Azure Policy, AWS Config, Open Policy Agent)
- Incident response background
- Ability to balance security rigor with developer productivity
If you cannot justify a dedicated security hire early, ensure your first or second hire has strong security fundamentals. Security bolted on after the fact is always more expensive and less effective than security built in from the start.
Skill Matrix: What Your Team Needs
As your team grows beyond the initial three roles, use a skill matrix to identify gaps and prioritize hiring. Here is a framework for a cloud engineering team targeting Azure:
| Skill Area | Junior | Mid-Level | Senior | Lead/Architect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Azure core services (VMs, networking, storage) | Working knowledge | Proficient | Expert | Expert + design authority |
| Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Bicep) | Basic usage | Independent development | Architecture patterns | Standards and governance |
| CI/CD (Azure DevOps / GitHub Actions) | Pipeline usage | Pipeline development | Pipeline architecture | Organization-wide strategy |
| Containers (Docker, AKS) | Development usage | Deployment and operations | Architecture and scaling | Platform strategy |
| Monitoring (Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana) | Dashboard usage | Alert configuration | Observability architecture | SLI/SLO framework design |
| Security (IAM, networking, encryption) | Awareness | Implementation | Architecture | Policy and governance |
| Scripting (Python, PowerShell, Bash) | Basic scripts | Automation development | Framework development | — |
| Cost management (FinOps) | Awareness | Resource optimization | Architecture for cost | Cost optimization strategy |
Use this matrix to evaluate candidates against specific team needs rather than generic job descriptions. It also helps existing team members understand their growth path.
Training vs. Hiring: The Build-or-Buy Decision
Not every skill gap requires a new hire. In many cases, upskilling existing team members is more effective and less risky.
When to Train Existing Staff
- The gap is tool-specific. An engineer who is strong in AWS but needs to learn Azure can typically ramp up in 2-4 months with structured training. The underlying concepts (networking, compute, storage, identity) transfer across platforms.
- The gap is depth, not breadth. A mid-level engineer who needs to deepen their Terraform skills can get there with mentorship, hands-on projects, and targeted training.
- The person has strong fundamentals. Engineers with solid systems thinking, networking knowledge, and problem-solving skills can learn most cloud-specific tools relatively quickly.
- You have time. Training requires weeks to months. If you need capability now, hiring is faster.
When to Hire
- The gap is foundational. If you need Kubernetes expertise and no one on your team has container orchestration experience, training from zero takes 6-12 months to reach production readiness. Hiring someone with production experience gets you there in weeks.
- The skill is specialized. Cloud security, SRE, and platform engineering require deep specialization that is difficult to develop through training alone.
- The workload requires it. If your current team is at capacity, adding training load without adding headcount burns people out.
- You need a culture shift. Bringing in someone from a strong cloud-native background can accelerate a culture change that training alone cannot achieve.
Hybrid Team Models: Augmenting with External Talent
Building a team from scratch does not mean every member needs to be a full-time employee from day one. A hybrid model that combines full-time hires with contract-to-hire staff and managed service partnerships can accelerate your timeline while managing cost and risk.
When to Use Contractors
- Surge capacity. During migrations or major infrastructure projects, short-term contractors can supplement your core team without committing to permanent headcount.
- Specialized skills. If you need niche expertise (advanced Kubernetes networking, multi-region disaster recovery design) for a specific project phase, a contractor with deep specialization is often more effective than trying to hire a permanent employee with that exact skill set.
- Evaluation period. As discussed in our contract-to-hire guide, starting key hires on contracts lets you evaluate fit before making a permanent commitment.
When to Use Managed Services
For organizations that are not ready to build a full internal cloud team, or that want to supplement their team with external expertise, a managed cloud services partner can provide ongoing infrastructure management, monitoring, and optimization while you build internal capability.
This is not an either-or decision. Many organizations use managed services for foundational infrastructure management while building an internal team focused on platform engineering and application-specific infrastructure.
Scaling from 1 to 10+ Engineers
As your team grows, the challenges shift from technical execution to team organization, knowledge management, and process maturity.
1-3 Engineers: The Founding Phase
Focus on foundational architecture, establishing infrastructure-as-code practices, and building the initial cloud environment. Every engineer works on everything. Communication is informal. Decision-making is fast.
Key risk: Burnout. A small team covering a broad scope can easily overcommit. Prioritize ruthlessly and use external support for overflow work.
4-6 Engineers: The Specialization Phase
Introduce role specialization. Assign primary ownership areas (networking, CI/CD, security, monitoring) while maintaining enough cross-training that no single person is a critical dependency. Begin formalizing processes: code review standards, change management, incident response.
Key risk: Knowledge silos. As engineers specialize, they accumulate knowledge that others on the team don’t have. Invest in documentation, architecture decision records, and regular knowledge-sharing sessions.
7-10+ Engineers: The Scaling Phase
Consider splitting into sub-teams (platform, reliability, security) or adopting the platform team model described above. Introduce formal on-call rotations, SLI/SLO frameworks, and capacity planning. Hire or designate a team lead or engineering manager to handle people management so senior ICs can focus on technical leadership.
Key risk: Losing the startup culture. As the team grows, the informal communication and rapid decision-making of the founding phase gives way to process and structure. This is necessary, but manage the transition deliberately to preserve the engineering culture that attracted your best people.
FAQ
What is the ideal size for a cloud engineering team? There is no universal answer because team size depends on the scope of your cloud environment, the number of application teams you support, and your operating model. As a rough benchmark, organizations with $50,000-$200,000/month in cloud spend typically have 3-6 dedicated cloud/infrastructure engineers. Organizations with larger environments or more complex architectures scale to 10-20+. The key metric is not team size but team effectiveness — measured by deployment frequency, incident response time, infrastructure reliability, and internal customer satisfaction.
Should I hire a cloud architect or a hands-on engineer first? Hire a hands-on senior engineer first. In the early stages, you need someone who can both design and implement. A pure architect who creates designs but cannot (or will not) execute on them leaves you with plans but no production infrastructure. Your first hire should be someone who can architect a solution on a whiteboard in the morning and implement it in Terraform in the afternoon. Dedicated architecture roles become valuable once the team grows to 5+ engineers and the scope warrants full-time design and governance work.
How long does it take to build a functional cloud engineering team? Plan for 6-9 months to go from zero to a functional team of 3-4 engineers who are productive and working well together. The first hire typically takes 4-8 weeks to recruit and 4-6 weeks to fully onboard. Subsequent hires overlap with the first hire’s onboarding period. Working with a technical recruiting partner can compress the recruiting portion significantly by providing pre-vetted candidates ready to interview within days.
Can we build a cloud team with mostly junior engineers to save on salary costs? This is one of the most common and costly mistakes. A team of junior engineers without senior leadership will make foundational architectural decisions that create years of technical debt. The cost of cleaning up a poorly designed cloud environment far exceeds the salary savings from hiring junior. Start with at least one senior engineer who sets the direction, then add junior and mid-level engineers who can learn from them. The senior-to-junior ratio should be at least 1:2 in the early stages.
Should our cloud team be centralized or embedded in application teams? Start centralized. In the early stages of cloud adoption, having a dedicated central team ensures consistent architecture, security, and governance. As the organization’s cloud maturity increases and the environment stabilizes, you can evolve toward a platform team model or embedded engineers. Attempting to distribute cloud expertise across application teams before you have established central standards leads to inconsistency, duplicated effort, and security gaps.