Cloud Engineer CV Example

A meticulously crafted, tailored cloud engineer CV gives your application the best chance of passing the ATS screening stage, impressing the hiring manager and progressing to the interview stage. Let’s take a closer look at the key parts of a CV and how to develop them for maximum impact.

Main cloud engineer CV sections

Your cloud engineer CV strategy will depend on various factors, including your previous experience, your seniority and the details listed in the job description.

However, no matter where you are in your career, a cloud engineer CV must present a clear, compelling narrative of your professional journey. To help you build that story, we’ll now break down the document piece-by-piece—from the initial contact header to your most significant career milestones.

CV Header

Start your cloud engineer CV with a professional-looking header that includes all the relevant contact information. This usually includes your name, your email address, your phone number and your location, but not your full address. Additionally, listing your LinkedIn profile in your CV header can be valuable. It serves to provide more detailed information about your career journey, your qualifications and your industry standing, in an easily accessible way.

For UK applications, it's not usually advisable to include a personal photo or any other personal details, such as your age, gender, nationality or ethnicity. These can risk introducing bias to the decision-making process and are discouraged under the terms of the Equality Act 2010.

CV Summary

Below your contact information, a short, concise CV summary or CV objective can set the tone for your application and provide brief, basic information on your key skills and qualities that gives a strong indication to the reader about your suitability for the cloud engineer role. As an alternative to the CV summary, you might wish to write a CV objective. This serves a similar purpose, but instead of focusing on your experience, it highlights you career ambitions and objectives.

In your summary or objective, write up to three sentences outlining your key skills, unique personal qualities and career achievements or ambitions, taking care to always reflect the requirements listed in the job description.

A good CV summary would typically focus on a couple of key skills that match the job description, demonstrating how you've used them to good effect in previous roles. It's important to focus on your unique qualities and provide a preview of how they've made an impact in your career to date, which you'll unpack later in the document. Find an example below of a positive cloud engineer CV summary, characterised by evidence to support your claims and well-structured, easy-to-read sentences.

The cloud engineer CV summary above gives you an idea of what to avoid. The differences are subtle, yet significant. For a summary to make less of an impact, it might include generic or vague information, lack evidence of your impact, or fail to highlight specific personal qualities that make you stand out from other candidates. It may also lack tailoring to the job description or include long, poorly structured sentences.

Employment History

Work experience is usually the most important section of any CV. Employers will be looking for evidence of how you've developed relevant skills in your career to date, and how you've used them to positive effect in previous roles. Always take the time to tailor this section, including keywords and phrases that match the job description. This will help employers to judge how strong a fit you are for the role, and how you might apply your skills for the benefit of the organisation.

List only relevant previous jobs, and add your job title, the name of the employer, its location and your dates of employment. Under this, write several bullet points showing employers how your skills and key qualities contributed to positive outcomes.

What differentiates an excellent work experience section from an average one is the use of action verbs and quantifiable evidence, showing how your actions led directly to positive results in previous roles. You'll also want to show how you've added relevant skills and increased your impact throughout your career progression. Take a look at this cloud engineer CV example work experience section for inspiration:

Above you can see an example of what not to do with your cloud engineer CV work experience section. A less-engaging work experience section might include irrelevant roles or jobs from a long time ago, and generic information that fails to address the requirements of the job description. It could also lack evidence to support the claims made in the bullet points.

Education

Your education section is the chance to list your most recent and highest qualifications, and anything that's relevant or required for the role.

For working in cloud engineer positions, it's essential to have a relevant university degree, and as such, you'll want to feature it in your CV. Include your Bachelor of Science in Cloud Computing or another related degree that qualifies you for the role, in your CV, along with any other degrees or qualifications that highlight your strongest key skills, including CI/CD pipeline management skills or docker container orchestration capabilities.

When listing your qualifications in your education section, select only the most suitable qualifications and list them in reverse-chronological order, starting with the most recent and working backwards. For each qualification, add its name and level, the awarding body or institution, its location (if necessary) and your dates of attendance or graduation. If you want to emphasise your education in your CV, include bullet points showing specialist areas of study, projects, awards, society memberships or anything else that helps show you've got the necessary skills for the job.

You might also wish to add specialist qualifications, certifications or licences that are required for the role. If you add any of these, include the expiry date, if the qualification requires renewal in the future.

Skills

In your CV skills section, include a combination of the key hard and soft skills you possess, that make you a suitable candidate for the position. Make sure your skills list reflects the requirements specified in the job description, and include a few skills that are unique to you, and help set you apart from the pack. In a cloud engineer CV, focus on the most relevant and essential skills in your skills portfolio, such as communication and terraform infrastructure provisioning knowledge, to show you're qualified for the cloud engineer position and to put you in a strong position to progress.

Hard Skills

Hard skills refer to the technical and specialist skills required for the everyday duties of the job. They might include specialist knowledge, or the use of certain software and equipment. You can gain these skills through study, training or industry experience, and they might require a licence or certification. For cloud engineer roles, key hard skills you've gained, such as AWS infrastructure as code, and docker container orchestration capabilities, are typically among the most critical for the job. Firstly, check the job description, then add four or five key hard skills in your CV that help the employer to decide if you're a good fit for the role.

You'll want to include a list of hard skills that closely matches the skills listed as 'essential' or 'desirable' in the job description, while also reflecting your own strongest technical skills.

Take a look below to see the type of skills that are commonly listed in a cloud engineer CV hard skills section:

Soft Skills

Your soft skills list should contain a list of your personal strengths that make you suitable for the role, and a good fit for the team and the organisation. In contrast to hard skills, these tend to be transferable and applicable to different roles and levels. As a result of rapid technological changes to modern ways of working, soft skills are becoming more and more valuable to employers. Soft skills can also be particularly useful for junior or entry-level roles where candidates haven't had the time or career experience to develop hard skills and notable achievements.

As with your cloud engineer CV hard skills list, review the job description to learn the key soft skills for the role. Include the best soft skills that you can provide evidence for throughout your CV. Draft a list of up to five key soft and transferable skills, combining the most essential skills from the job description with your strongest personal qualities.

Explore the examples below to identify soft skills commonly presented in a cloud engineer CV.

Language Skills

If you speak a foreign language, it can be beneficial to include a languages section on your cloud engineer CV. Whether languages are a requirement of the job description or not, if your CV lists additional languages, this typically reflects well on you as a candidate. In this section, include any foreign languages you speak to a standard that could be useful in the world of work, with an indication of your proficiency level.

There are a few acceptable ways of citing your foreign language proficiency levels. The simplest way is to assign a basic descriptive word to indicate your skills, such as:

• English: Fluent
• Spanish: Intermediate

You might wish to use an internationally recognised standard for your language skills, such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). This divides your language skills into the following categories:

• A1: Beginner
• A2: Elementary
• B1: Intermediate
• B2: Upper intermediate
• C1: Advanced
• C2: Proficiency

Certifications

Depending on the role and your qualifications, it might be necessary to include a certifications section. It can be a valuable way of differentiating yourself from other candidates and showing employers your dedication, motivation and commitment to professional development. Furthermore, if there are any necessary certifications or licences for the job, this CV section takes on even more importance. If you're applying for a technical role or a position that involves the use of specialist software or equipment, these might make it more necessary to include a section showcasing your training.

Take a look at this list of example certifications and licences for cloud engineer candidates:

Additional Sections

Optional sections can be useful to add to your CV, to provide additional evidence that you have the skills for the cloud engineer job. Consider adding optional sections if you're unable to show all the necessary skills for the job through work experience, but could show them through extracurricular activities and other areas of life. This could be especially relevant if you're a junior candidate, or if you're changing careers.

If you're curious about other ways to make your CV more effective, our career resources will help you strengthen your application.

Hobbies and Interests

One valid way to show you have relevant skills for the job is by listing your hobbies and interests. Additionally, this section gives you the chance to show employers different facets of your personality and interests beyond work, which can help them to differentiate you from other applicants. However, a hobbies and interests section is only valuable if it helps you to show relevant skills you've been unable to evidence in other parts of your CV. If your hobbies and interests are unrelated to the job, it's best to leave them off your CV.

Achievements and Awards

Including an achievements and awards section is an effective way of showing the reader the value you've added for employers in your career to date. If you've won any awards or achieved any key milestones in your career to date, you might want to mention them here.

Voluntary Roles

Another alternative to showcasing your skills and experience through work experience is by adding a volunteering section. This can give you a valuable showcase of your skills, particularly if you're a junior candidate or career changer without much relevant work experience. For this section, use a similar structure to your work experience section.

List your job title or a description of the role, the organisation name, its location and the dates you occupied the role. Use bullet points to show employers how you put your skills to use, and any positive achievements from your time in the role.

Best action verbs for an engaging cloud engineer CV

Adding strong action verbs to the bullet points in your CV's work experience section is a great way to focus on the key skills required for the job, while showing the impact you've made. Start each bullet point with an action word that reflects the job description, so the reader can easily identify your best qualities. Always remember to back up any action verbs you use with evidence that shows the impact it made and the achievements that it led to. Use past tense for action verbs that describe previous roles, and present tense for your current position.

Example of a cloud engineer CV

Now we've shown you everything that needs to go into your cloud engineer CV, we can take a look at how it comes together in its final form in the following example:

If you want to get a feel for how your CV will look once you finalise its design and layout, check out our CV examples for inspiration.

Tips for optimising your CV for ATS

Employers and recruiters now routinely use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to ease the burden of the selection process. One of the key functions of these systems is CV screening, which reviews CVs and ranks them based on their likely fit for the role. This task can relieve some of the strain on hiring managers through the recruitment process, which can become very resource-intensive, with roles often eliciting hundreds of applications.

Because ATS software is becoming more common in the recruitment process, it's important to make some concessions in your CV to give yourself the best chance of progressing beyond the initial screening. With that in mind, here are some tips on preparing your CV for ATS screening:

• Include keywords and phrases from the job description that are easy for ATS apps to identify, and help make you appear a strong fit for the role.
• Use clear, standard CV headings that are easily recognisable, such as 'work experience', 'education' and 'skills'.
• Opt for a simple CV layout with consistent formatting, avoiding any special design elements that could make your CV harder for ATS apps to scan.
• Select a font that increases the readability of your CV, such as popular serif and sans serif fonts, between the sizes of 10 and 12 for main text and 14 and 16 for headings.
• Use bullet points throughout your CV in place of full sentences. This serves a few purposes, reducing the overall length, helping keywords stand out and making it overall more scannable by ATS apps.

You might feel there are a lot of things to remember when writing an ATS-compatible CV, but with just a few small tweaks, you can ensure yours passes this stage. Use one of our expert-designed, ATS-compatible CV templates to avoid the stress of adapting your CV for ATS screening.

Key takeaways for a successful cloud engineer CV

To stand out from the crowd with your CV, tailor your approach to each individual application, incorporating keywords and phrases that match the job description. Use a CV format that reflects your experience levels, and emphasise your skills and achievements throughout your CV, to show employers you've got the required skills and experience for the job.

Finally, building your CV using Jobseeker's HR-approved CV templates can help to catch the eye of recruiters and hiring managers, making your application stand out and giving you the best chance of gaining your dream job.

References:

1. Barnet Council (UK local government), Recruitment tips: How to write a supporting statement
2. Jobseeker, Recruitment Statistics