What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Cloud Engineer / AWS / Hybrid in San Francisco position at Motion Recruitment Partners, LLC?
A leading financial technology organization is undergoing a large-scale cloud transformation and is seeking a Staff Cloud Engineer to help lead the migration of a mission-critical payments platform from on-premise infrastructure to AWS. This is a high-impact initiative tied directly to modernizing a core product that processes high-volume, real-time transactions in a highly regulated environment.
In this role, you'll partner closely with platform engineering, security, and application teams to design and implement scalable, cloud-native infrastructure. You'll play a key role in shaping architecture decisions, driving best practices around reliability and security, and ensuring a smooth transition from legacy systems to modern AWS-based solutions. This is a highly visible position where you'll be expected to operate at a staff level - owning complex technical challenges, influencing direction, and helping elevate engineering standards across the organization.
The ideal candidate has a strong background in cloud and platform engineering, deep experience with AWS and Kubernetes, and a track record of supporting large-scale migrations or distributed systems in production environments. This person should be comfortable working across the stack, from infrastructure and CI/CD to observability and incident response, with a mindset focused on scalability, resilience, and continuous improvement.
This role is hybrid and requires onsite work 3 days per week in San Francisco, CA.
Required Skills & Experience
Tech Breakdown
The Offer
Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the US on a full-time basis now and in the future
In this role, you'll partner closely with platform engineering, security, and application teams to design and implement scalable, cloud-native infrastructure. You'll play a key role in shaping architecture decisions, driving best practices around reliability and security, and ensuring a smooth transition from legacy systems to modern AWS-based solutions. This is a highly visible position where you'll be expected to operate at a staff level - owning complex technical challenges, influencing direction, and helping elevate engineering standards across the organization.
The ideal candidate has a strong background in cloud and platform engineering, deep experience with AWS and Kubernetes, and a track record of supporting large-scale migrations or distributed systems in production environments. This person should be comfortable working across the stack, from infrastructure and CI/CD to observability and incident response, with a mindset focused on scalability, resilience, and continuous improvement.
This role is hybrid and requires onsite work 3 days per week in San Francisco, CA.
Required Skills & Experience
- 8 years of experience in Cloud Engineering, DevOps, or related roles
- 3 years of hands-on experience in AWS environments
- Deep expertise with AWS services such as EC2, EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, and IAM
- Strong experience with Kubernetes (EKS) and containerization (Docker)
- Proven experience building and managing Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar)
- Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices
- Strong understanding of cloud security, including IAM, encryption, and network design
- Experience supporting or leading migrations from on-premise to cloud environments
- Experience working in regulated environments (PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FFIEC, etc.)
- Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk, etc.)
- Strong troubleshooting skills and ability to lead root cause analysis across distributed systems
- Experience collaborating cross-functionally and influencing technical direction
- Experience in FinTech, banking, or highly regulated industries
- Familiarity with disaster recovery planning and high availability architecture
- Experience with vulnerability management and patching programs
- Exposure to additional programming languages such as Python, Ruby, or C#
- Experience with container security tools (Twistlock, Aqua, etc.)
- AWS or other cloud certifications
Tech Breakdown
- 100% AWS
- 100% Hands on
The Offer
- Salary Benefits Bonus
- Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
- Vacation Time
- Stock Options
Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the US on a full-time basis now and in the future
Salary : $170,000 - $220,000