A hiring manager's question bank for AWS cloud engineers. Use these to find candidates who design secure, cost-aware architectures — not ones who have only clicked around the console.
Hiring an AWS cloud engineer is really about hiring judgment, because AWS gives you a hundred ways to do anything and only a few of them are right for your situation. The danger is a candidate who has memorized service names and passed a certification but has never had to explain why a workload bankrupted the team on NAT gateway charges, or why their security group let the whole internet into a database. Good questions force the candidate to make architectural choices and defend them: when to use a load balancer versus a CDN, how to lay out public and private subnets in a VPC so a database is never reachable from the internet, how IAM roles beat long-lived access keys, and how to make a system scale and stay cheap at the same time. The Well-Architected Framework — its pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability — is a useful spine for a senior conversation, since strong candidates naturally trade those pillars against each other rather than chasing one in isolation. The questions below are grouped so you can probe core compute and storage choices, VPC and networking, IAM and security, and the scalability-plus-cost thinking that separates an engineer who can build something that works from one who can build something that works, stays secure, and doesn't blow the budget. Look for people who ask "what does this cost and who can reach it?" before they reach for a service, who default to least privilege, and who can sketch a multi-AZ architecture and explain exactly what fails over when an availability zone goes down.
Pick six to eight questions across compute, networking, security, and cost rather than running the entire list. Frame the security and cost questions as "defend this design" discussions — the reasoning a candidate gives matters far more than naming the right service.
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