Dedicated AWS cloud engineers
Hire AWS engineers who ship infrastructure as code and keep your cloud bill under control
Grape5 places dedicated AWS cloud engineers who design, build, and run your infrastructure on AWS: VPC networking, IAM, EC2/ECS/EKS or Lambda, RDS and DynamoDB, plus CI/CD, monitoring, and cost control. Every engineer is pre-vetted on live code and system design, and backed by a free replacement if the fit is wrong.
In short
Grape5 places dedicated AWS cloud engineers who design, build, and run your infrastructure on AWS: VPC networking, IAM, EC2/ECS/EKS or Lambda, RDS and DynamoDB, plus CI/CD, monitoring, and cost control.
Every engineer is pre-vetted on live code and system design, and backed by a free replacement if the fit is wrong.
When to hire AWS engineers
- Your app outgrew a single EC2 instance and needs a real multi-AZ setup: private subnets, an Application Load Balancer, Auto Scaling, and RDS with a standby for failover.
- Your AWS bill jumped and no one can explain it, so you need someone to right-size instances, delete idle load balancers and unattached EBS volumes, and set up tagging plus billing alarms.
- A customer security review or SOC 2 flagged open security groups, wildcard IAM policies, and a public S3 bucket, and you need them closed without breaking the app.
- You are stuck doing everything by hand in the console and want infrastructure moved into Terraform or CDK with a CI/CD pipeline so changes are reviewed and repeatable.
How we vet AWS engineers
Every engineer we put forward is screened by a senior Grape5 engineer before you meet them. For AWS engineers, we look specifically at:
- IAM under least privilege: we have them write a policy scoped to specific actions and resources, explain assume-role and STS, use permission boundaries, and say why a wildcard action or an inline admin policy is a red flag.
- VPC networking: public vs private subnets, security groups vs NACLs, NAT gateway cost and data-processing charges, and why cross-AZ or cross-region data transfer quietly shows up on the bill.
- Infrastructure as code: Terraform remote state with locking and drift detection, or CloudFormation and CDK, sane module structure, and keeping secrets out of state using Secrets Manager or SSM Parameter Store.
- Cost work: right-sizing, Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances vs Spot, finding idle resources, and a tagging strategy that makes cost attribution possible.
- Reliability and observability: CloudWatch alarms and dashboards, Auto Scaling policies, RDS Multi-AZ failover, and handling Lambda cold starts, timeouts, and concurrency limits.
Grape5 vs a freelancer marketplace
Grape5
- Who the engineer works for
- Vetted, dedicated, and backed by Grape5 for your engagement.
- Vetting
- Screened by our own senior engineers, code, system design and communication, before you ever meet them.
- Timezone
- 4+ hours of daily overlap with your US working hours, in your tools and standups.
- If it isn't working
- We replace them from the bench, usually within days, at no extra cost.
- Continuity
- The same team, retained and growing with your product.
A freelancer marketplace
- Who the engineer works for
- An independent contractor juggling several clients at once.
- Vetting
- Self-reported skills, a résumé and a star rating.
- Timezone
- Whatever hours the contractor decides to keep.
- If it isn't working
- You re-post the role and start the search from scratch.
- Continuity
- Churn between contracts, the context leaves when they do.
| Grape5 | A freelancer marketplace | |
|---|---|---|
| Who the engineer works for | Vetted, dedicated, and backed by Grape5 for your engagement. | An independent contractor juggling several clients at once. |
| Vetting | Screened by our own senior engineers, code, system design and communication, before you ever meet them. | Self-reported skills, a résumé and a star rating. |
| Timezone | 4+ hours of daily overlap with your US working hours, in your tools and standups. | Whatever hours the contractor decides to keep. |
| If it isn't working | We replace them from the bench, usually within days, at no extra cost. | You re-post the role and start the search from scratch. |
| Continuity | The same team, retained and growing with your product. | Churn between contracts, the context leaves when they do. |
Related roles you can hire
Pre-vetted engineers across adjacent skills, dedicated to your product and your US working hours.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, that is common work. A Grape5 engineer can tighten IAM to least privilege, close open security groups, enable encryption with KMS, turn on GuardDuty and CloudTrail, and fix public S3 buckets. We do not issue certifications or make audit guarantees. The engineer does the technical hardening your auditor asks for.
You own the account and control access. Most clients grant a dedicated IAM role or SSO access with least-privilege permissions, and can scope it down or revoke it at any time. Your engineer works inside your policies, your MFA, and your review process, not a shared login.
We vet for infrastructure as code specifically. Candidates show real Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK work, including remote state, modules, and drift handling. If your stack is still click-ops, a Grape5 engineer can move it into code so changes are reviewed and repeatable.
Often, yes. Common wins are right-sizing over-provisioned instances, deleting idle resources, moving steady workloads to Savings Plans or Reserved Instances, and using Spot where it fits. We scope this per engagement rather than quoting a flat number, because the savings depend on your current setup.
A Solutions Architect or similar cert is a useful signal, but it is not proof. We vet on live code, a system design discussion, and communication, so you see how someone actually designs a VPC, scopes IAM, or debugs a failing deploy, not just which badges they hold. If the fit is wrong, we replace them free.
Tell us the role. Get vetted profiles.
Send us the seniority and stack you need. We’ll come back with a shortlist of vetted AWS engineers who’ve shipped it, and a plan to start in 2 to 3 weeks.