Staff Cloud Engineer / AWS / Hybrid in San Francisco in San Francisco, California

Location

San Francisco, California

Job Type

Full-time

Company

Motion Recruitment

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 • 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

Desired Skills & Experience • 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

What You Will Be Doing

Tech Breakdown • 100% AWS

Daily Responsibilities • 100% Hands on

The Offer • Salary + Benefits + Bonus

You will receive the following benefits: • 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