South helps growing companies find, hire, and pay top Latin American talent. Build high-performing teams in 21 days or less.
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An AWS Developer builds, deploys, integrates, and maintains software that uses Amazon Web Services.
Their work usually sits between application development and cloud infrastructure.
Typical AWS Developer responsibilities include:
The exact position depends heavily on the application.
One AWS Developer may primarily build serverless services using:
Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB.
Another may work with:
ECS + RDS + ElastiCache.
Another may develop applications running on:
EKS + Kafka + PostgreSQL.
Hire for the AWS architecture your team actually runs rather than asking candidates to know every service in the AWS catalog.
If application features depend directly on services such as Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, SQS, or EventBridge, a developer with strong AWS experience can design those integrations more effectively.
Cloud migration may involve:
A developer with migration experience can help move workloads gradually while keeping the application operational.
A strong Back-End Developer can learn AWS.
AWS still contains enough platform-specific architecture that deeper specialization can become useful as the environment grows.
An AWS Developer can take ownership of cloud-specific application patterns while other engineers focus on product functionality.
Serverless architecture requires deeper knowledge of:
The platform manages much of the infrastructure, while developers still need to handle event design, retries, permissions, observability, and cost.
Increasing cloud cost can come from:
An experienced AWS Developer can investigate application-level cost drivers and redesign selected workloads.
If the application is moving from traditional servers toward Docker, ECS, or EKS, you may need someone comfortable designing and deploying containerized AWS workloads.
Console-created infrastructure becomes difficult to reproduce and review.
An AWS Developer experienced with:
can help move application infrastructure into version control.
Broad IAM permissions can create security risk.
A developer with strong IAM experience can design application roles and policies around least privilege.
Products with complex asynchronous workflows may need:
Someone with real production event-driven experience can help with retries, failure handling, idempotency, and monitoring.
Distributed cloud applications may involve dozens of services.
Without good observability, teams can spend hours figuring out why a request failed.
A strong AWS Developer can improve:
If your product uses Bedrock or other AWS AI services, an AWS Developer can integrate model functionality with:
A strong AWS Developer combines cloud-platform expertise with actual software-development ability.
Candidates should understand the services central to your application.
Common examples include:
Don't expect candidates to know every AWS service equally well.
AWS Developer positions usually require at least one production programming language.
Common examples include:
The right language should match your application.
For serverless roles, candidates should understand:
Container-heavy roles may require:
Candidates should understand the database technologies they use rather than treating every AWS database as interchangeable.
Relevant experience may include:
Candidates should understand:
Ask practical permission questions rather than definitions alone.
Relevant knowledge may include:
Look for experience with:
Infrastructure changes should ideally be reviewable and reproducible.
Candidates may have experience with:
Evaluate knowledge of:
Practical AWS security knowledge may include:
Senior candidates should understand:
Strong candidates should understand the financial effects of architecture choices.
Ask them to compare the cost implications of different compute, database, and networking approaches.
Developers should be comfortable working with pull requests, branches, reviews, and version-controlled infrastructure.
AWS certifications can provide useful supporting evidence.
They shouldn't replace practical production experience.
A candidate who can explain an outage they debugged is usually more informative than someone who can only list certification names.
AWS Developer compensation depends on seniority, programming experience, cloud architecture depth, infrastructure-as-code expertise, and the AWS services involved.
South's current Roles directory lists an all-in monthly rate of approximately $4,650 for AWS Developer talent in Latin America, with potential savings of up to 54%.
Your actual rate will depend on the AWS Developer you need.
Junior developers can contribute to:
They work best when senior engineers provide architecture and security guidance.
Mid-level developers can typically own complete cloud application features.
They may handle:
Senior developers may take responsibility for broader technical decisions.
They can:
Some roles require deeper specialization.
Examples include:
Define the actual workload rather than asking one developer to specialize in every AWS service.
A strong AWS Developer interview should test software engineering, architecture, IAM, networking, infrastructure as code, reliability, cost, and production debugging.
Avoid turning the interview into a quiz about AWS service names.
Ask:
Walk me through the most complex application you've deployed on AWS.
Then ask:
This quickly reveals whether the candidate has made real cloud architecture decisions.
Ask:
You're building a new API. How would you decide between Lambda, ECS, and EKS?
Strong answers should discuss:
Ask:
A Lambda function only needs to read files from one S3 bucket. What permissions would you give it?
Look for least privilege rather than broad administrator policies.
Ask:
Your application server is public, while the database should remain private. How would you structure the VPC?
Candidates may discuss:
Ask:
You need to store millions of transactions in DynamoDB. How would you decide the partition and sort keys?
Strong candidates should start from access patterns.
Ask:
A customer creates an order and five downstream operations need to happen. Should the API wait for all five?
Explore:
Ask:
A production engineer manually creates an S3 bucket in the console. What's the problem with that?
Look for:
Ask:
Users say checkout occasionally takes 20 seconds. The application crosses API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and an external payment provider. How would you investigate it?
Candidates may discuss:
Ask:
What happens if one Availability Zone becomes unavailable?
Strong candidates should understand which parts of their architecture depend on one AZ and which can continue operating.
Ask:
Our AWS bill increased 60% while user traffic increased 10%. What would you investigate first?
Look for a systematic approach rather than immediately blaming EC2.
Ask:
An SQS-triggered Lambda occasionally processes the same message twice. Is that possible, and how would you design around it?
Look for idempotent processing.
Useful questions include:
Choose questions based on your architecture.
A Lambda-heavy startup and an EKS-based platform team need very different AWS interviews.
An AWS Developer focuses more heavily on building application software that uses AWS services.
A Cloud Engineer commonly focuses more heavily on:
There can be substantial overlap.
Hire an AWS Developer when your biggest need is shipping application features inside AWS.
Hire a Cloud Engineer when your biggest challenge is managing the cloud environment itself.
A DevOps Engineer commonly focuses on:
An AWS Developer may use many of the same tools while spending more time writing product or service code.
If the person primarily enables other developers to deploy software, DevOps may be the clearer title.
If they primarily build the cloud-native application itself, AWS Developer may fit better.
A Back-End Developer focuses broadly on application APIs, business logic, and databases.
An AWS Developer specializes more deeply in the cloud services those applications use.
A Back-End Developer might build a Node.js API deployed to AWS.
An AWS Developer might additionally own:
Some positions combine both roles.
A Cloud Architect generally focuses at a broader level.
Their work may include:
An AWS Developer usually spends more time implementing individual services and applications.
Hire the architect when the challenge involves overall cloud direction.
Hire the AWS Developer when the architecture is reasonably established and you need someone to build within it.
A Site Reliability Engineer focuses heavily on:
An AWS Developer may care about all of those areas while remaining primarily responsible for building application functionality.
South helps U.S. companies find AWS Developers across Latin America based on the applications, cloud services, programming languages, and infrastructure responsibilities involved.
Start with the architecture.
Consider:
A serverless developer building Lambda APIs needs a different background from someone maintaining Kubernetes workloads on EKS.
South identifies AWS Developers across Latin America whose backgrounds align with your requirements.
Evaluation can include:
You receive a focused selection of candidates rather than sorting through a large volume of generic cloud applications.
Compare their:
Your engineering team interviews the candidates you want to meet.
Use realistic AWS architecture scenarios, IAM questions, production incidents, cost problems, and examples from your existing cloud environment.
You make the final hiring decision and manage your AWS Developer as part of your team.
South provides one consolidated monthly invoice covering your teammate's compensation and South's service.
There are no minimum commitments, and South offers a free replacement if you need to make a change.
AWS Developers frequently collaborate with:
Latin America's overlap with U.S. working hours supports:
Companies can access AWS Developers across Latin America with experience in Lambda, EC2, ECS, EKS, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Terraform, CDK, CloudWatch, Python, TypeScript, and other technologies used in modern cloud applications.
An AWS Developer builds applications and services that use Amazon Web Services.
Their work may include Lambda, containers, APIs, databases, queues, IAM, infrastructure as code, monitoring, deployment, and cloud integrations.
Compensation depends on seniority and cloud specialization.
South's current Roles directory lists an all-in monthly rate of approximately $4,650 for AWS Developer talent in Latin America, with potential savings of up to 54%.
Look for practical AWS experience, strong programming skills, IAM, networking, databases, infrastructure as code, observability, security, and real production experience.
The services you prioritize should match your architecture.
No.
AWS has a very broad service portfolio.
Prioritize expertise in the services your application actually uses.
Terraform isn't mandatory if your team uses CDK or CloudFormation.
Infrastructure-as-code experience itself is usually more important than one specific tool.
Certifications can provide useful supporting evidence.
Hands-on production experience should carry more weight when evaluating the candidate's ability to design, deploy, debug, and operate real AWS workloads.
An AWS Developer focuses more heavily on application development using AWS services.
A Cloud Engineer usually focuses more heavily on infrastructure, networking, and cloud operations.
Consider hiring one when AWS is central to your product, you're building serverless or cloud-native services, migrating workloads, introducing infrastructure as code, improving cloud reliability, or dealing with increasing AWS complexity and cost.
Yes. Latin America has AWS Developers with experience across Lambda, EC2, ECS, EKS, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, IAM, Terraform, Python, TypeScript, monitoring, and production cloud systems, with working hours that can align closely with U.S. teams.
The right AWS Developer helps your team use AWS services intentionally instead of allowing every new application requirement to create another layer of cloud cost and complexity.
South helps U.S. companies find pre-vetted AWS Developers across Latin America based on AWS depth, programming ability, cloud architecture experience, seniority, and communication.
Schedule a free call and find your next AWS Developer in Latin America with South.
The region has the perfect mix of everything you want in remote employees: English skills, shared time zones, hard-working, and depth of talent. They are already accustomed to working remotely for top US startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Absolutely! The US and Latin America have basically the same time zones. No Latin American city is more than two hours ahead of EST.
Every hire is sourced based on your exact needs. They will arrive ready to support your business right away. They can do basically any tasks done remotely, but we recommend starting them as support so your team has more bandwidth for high-value strategic tasks.
All types of roles - customer service, executive assistant, sales, accounting, email marketing, lead generation, content writers, operations, social media marketing, and more!
You can pay directly through us (most popular) or we can connect you with one of our payroll partners.
You don't have to deal with any American labor laws / taxes when hiring full-time remote contractors. They aren't US-based, so no visas or sponsorships to deal with either.
Pricing is one flat monthly rate per hire. The rate includes your teammate's compensation and South's service in a single consolidated invoice. It covers sourcing, vetting, payroll, compliance, ongoing support, and a free replacement if you ever need one. Rates vary by role and seniority. See our savings by role page for typical ranges, then we'll confirm an exact rate for your role.
There are no cancellation fees or minimum commitments, and you only pay if you make a hire.
Yes, we only recruit for full-time and we strongly recommend full-time hiring if you can. Stability (full-time & long-term) is highly sought after abroad. The top caliber candidates are only looking for full-time work.
You're also going to spend time training and getting them up to speed on your processes. It would be a waste to do that over and over again with new people all the time.
We recommend training new hires on one thing at a time.
For example, once they get up to speed on lead generation, you can add the next role writing blog posts or whatever you'd like. You can definitely overlap roles until you have enough work for multiple people.
The cost of living is much less in Latin American countries. Many of our employees are able to own homes, raise families, provide for their parents, and have in-home help of their own with their salaries.
If you aren't happy with your hire in the first 120 days, we will work with you to conduct a second round of search for the same role for free.
Just email us at Hello@HireInSouth.com and we will get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.
