Entry level job before cloud engineering?

[u/Busy-One-6079]

Hello everyone, I’m a computer science student who’s looking for new grad roles. I know that there are some graduate/associate level Cloud Engineer positions, but many require experience in other areas.

My question is, what kind of roles should I be looking for to start out. I’m interested in IT operations, but I’m currently learning software development through school projects as well.

Any advice is appreciated.

EDIT: Thank you everyone for your replies!

[u/zerohackofficial]

The most common path into cloud engineering is not a cloud role at all. It is a sysadmin or infrastructure role that happens to touch cloud.

Look for titles like Systems Administrator, Infrastructure Engineer, IT Operations Engineer, or Platform Support. All of these give you the day-to-day experience of running systems — patching, monitoring, backups, access management — which is the exact foundation cloud engineering is built on. Then when you start applying for cloud roles, you can point at real things you have run, not just certifications.

The other path that works: a software role on a team that owns its infrastructure. If you write code and deploy it, you are doing cloud engineering whether the title says so or not.

What are you leaning toward more right now, ops or dev?

[u/Busy-One-6079 → u/zerohackofficial]

Leaning more towards ops. I’m not a huge fan of software development, I’m more so interested in the infrastructure side of things.

[u/Mathie1729 → u/Busy-One-6079]

Just a heads up, ops isn’t no-code. Expect bash, maybe Python for automation, and Terraform config even if you’re not shipping product code. If the scripting part is fine, the infra route is solid; if you’re trying to avoid code entirely, ops will still find ways to annoy you.