What Does an AWS Developer Do?
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:
- Building cloud-native applications
- Creating Lambda functions
- Building serverless APIs
- Deploying applications to EC2
- Running containers on ECS
- Working with EKS where Kubernetes is required
- Integrating S3
- Building with RDS and Aurora
- Designing DynamoDB access patterns
- Creating SQS queues
- Publishing events through EventBridge
- Building Step Functions workflows
- Writing IAM policies
- Configuring application networking
- Managing application secrets
- Writing infrastructure as code
- Creating CloudFormation templates
- Building infrastructure with AWS CDK
- Working with Terraform
- Building CI/CD pipelines
- Monitoring applications with CloudWatch
- Troubleshooting distributed systems
- Improving application reliability
- Optimizing AWS costs
- Implementing backup strategies
- Supporting production incidents
- Reviewing pull requests
- Collaborating with DevOps and platform teams
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.
When Should You Hire an AWS Developer?
You're Building Cloud-Native Applications on AWS
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.
You're Moving an Application to AWS
Cloud migration may involve:
- Compute
- Databases
- Storage
- Networking
- DNS
- Security
- Deployment
A developer with migration experience can help move workloads gradually while keeping the application operational.
Your Back-End Developers Spend Too Much Time Learning AWS
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.
You're Building a Serverless Application
Serverless architecture requires deeper knowledge of:
- Lambda
- API Gateway
- DynamoDB
- SQS
- EventBridge
- Step Functions
- IAM
The platform manages much of the infrastructure, while developers still need to handle event design, retries, permissions, observability, and cost.
Your AWS Bill Is Growing Faster Than Usage
Increasing cloud cost can come from:
- Oversized compute
- Idle resources
- Data transfer
- NAT gateways
- Logging
- Database capacity
- Poor architecture
An experienced AWS Developer can investigate application-level cost drivers and redesign selected workloads.
You're Moving to Containers
If the application is moving from traditional servers toward Docker, ECS, or EKS, you may need someone comfortable designing and deploying containerized AWS workloads.
Your Infrastructure Is Still Created Manually
Console-created infrastructure becomes difficult to reproduce and review.
An AWS Developer experienced with:
- Terraform
- CloudFormation
- CDK
can help move application infrastructure into version control.
Your AWS Permissions Are Difficult to Manage
Broad IAM permissions can create security risk.
A developer with strong IAM experience can design application roles and policies around least privilege.
You're Building Event-Driven Systems
Products with complex asynchronous workflows may need:
- SQS
- SNS
- EventBridge
- Step Functions
- Lambda
Someone with real production event-driven experience can help with retries, failure handling, idempotency, and monitoring.
Your Production Environment Is Difficult to Debug
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:
- Logs
- Metrics
- Tracing
- Alarms
- Dashboards
You're Building Generative AI Features on AWS
If your product uses Bedrock or other AWS AI services, an AWS Developer can integrate model functionality with:
- APIs
- Authentication
- Databases
- Queues
- Application workflows
What Qualifications Should an AWS Developer Have?
A strong AWS Developer combines cloud-platform expertise with actual software-development ability.
Core AWS Services
Candidates should understand the services central to your application.
Common examples include:
- EC2
- S3
- Lambda
- API Gateway
- RDS
- DynamoDB
- SQS
- EventBridge
Don't expect candidates to know every AWS service equally well.
Programming
AWS Developer positions usually require at least one production programming language.
Common examples include:
- Python
- TypeScript
- Java
- JavaScript
- Go
- C#
The right language should match your application.
Serverless Architecture
For serverless roles, candidates should understand:
- Lambda
- API Gateway
- IAM
- DynamoDB
- SQS
- EventBridge
- Step Functions
Containers
Container-heavy roles may require:
Databases
Candidates should understand the database technologies they use rather than treating every AWS database as interchangeable.
Relevant experience may include:
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Aurora
- DynamoDB
- ElastiCache
IAM
Candidates should understand:
- Roles
- Policies
- Resource permissions
- Temporary credentials
- Least privilege
Ask practical permission questions rather than definitions alone.
VPC Networking
Relevant knowledge may include:
- Subnets
- Route tables
- Security groups
- NAT
- Load balancers
- VPC endpoints
Infrastructure as Code
Look for experience with:
- Terraform
- AWS CDK
- CloudFormation
Infrastructure changes should ideally be reviewable and reproducible.
CI/CD
Candidates may have experience with:
- GitHub Actions
- CodePipeline
- CodeBuild
- Jenkins
Observability
Evaluate knowledge of:
- CloudWatch
- Logs
- Metrics
- Alarms
- Tracing
- X-Ray
Security
Practical AWS security knowledge may include:
- IAM
- Secrets Manager
- KMS
- Private networking
- Encryption
- Logging
Reliability
Senior candidates should understand:
- Multi-AZ deployment
- Health checks
- Failover
- Backups
- Disaster recovery
- Retries
Cost Optimization
Strong candidates should understand the financial effects of architecture choices.
Ask them to compare the cost implications of different compute, database, and networking approaches.
Git
Developers should be comfortable working with pull requests, branches, reviews, and version-controlled infrastructure.
AWS Certifications
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.
How Much Does an AWS Developer Cost?
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 AWS Developer
Junior developers can contribute to:
- Existing Lambda functions
- Basic cloud integrations
- Application deployments
- S3
- CloudWatch
- Existing infrastructure code
They work best when senior engineers provide architecture and security guidance.
Mid-Level AWS Developer
Mid-level developers can typically own complete cloud application features.
They may handle:
- Serverless APIs
- Databases
- Queues
- IAM
- Infrastructure as code
- CI/CD
- Production troubleshooting
Senior AWS Developer
Senior developers may take responsibility for broader technical decisions.
They can:
- Design cloud-native architectures
- Review IAM
- Lead serverless systems
- Plan migrations
- Improve reliability
- Optimize cloud cost
- Mentor developers
- Lead incident investigation
Specialized AWS Developers
Some roles require deeper specialization.
Examples include:
- Serverless AWS Developers
- AWS Container Developers
- AWS Data Developers
- AWS AI Developers
- AWS Integration Developers
Define the actual workload rather than asking one developer to specialize in every AWS service.
How Do You Interview an AWS Developer?
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.
Start With a Production AWS System
Ask:
Walk me through the most complex application you've deployed on AWS.
Then ask:
- Which AWS services did it use?
- Why were they chosen?
- What did you personally own?
- How was infrastructure created?
- How was it deployed?
- How was it monitored?
- What was the hardest production incident?
- What did it cost?
- What would you redesign today?
This quickly reveals whether the candidate has made real cloud architecture decisions.
Test Compute Selection
Ask:
You're building a new API. How would you decide between Lambda, ECS, and EKS?
Strong answers should discuss:
- Workload behavior
- Runtime
- Scaling
- Operations
- Team expertise
- Cost
Test IAM
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.
Test Networking
Ask:
Your application server is public, while the database should remain private. How would you structure the VPC?
Candidates may discuss:
- Public/private subnets
- Load balancers
- Security groups
- Routing
Test DynamoDB
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.
Test Queues
Ask:
A customer creates an order and five downstream operations need to happen. Should the API wait for all five?
Explore:
- SQS
- Events
- Retries
- Failure handling
- Idempotency
Test Infrastructure as Code
Ask:
A production engineer manually creates an S3 bucket in the console. What's the problem with that?
Look for:
- Drift
- Reproducibility
- Review
- Documentation
- Automation
Test Observability
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:
- Metrics
- Logs
- Correlation IDs
- Tracing
- X-Ray
- External dependency latency
Test Reliability
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.
Test Cost
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.
Test Serverless Reliability
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.
AWS Developer Interview Questions
Useful questions include:
- Walk me through a production application you've built on AWS.
- When would you choose Lambda instead of ECS?
- When would EKS be justified over ECS?
- How do IAM roles and policies work together?
- How would you design a highly available application across Availability Zones?
- How do you structure public and private VPC resources?
- How do you choose partition keys in DynamoDB?
- When would you use SQS versus EventBridge?
- How do you make event processing idempotent?
- Which infrastructure-as-code tools have you used?
- How do you monitor distributed AWS applications?
- How would you investigate an unexpected AWS cost increase?
- How do you manage application secrets?
- How would you design backup and recovery for a critical application?
- Tell me about an AWS production incident you diagnosed and what you changed afterward.
Choose questions based on your architecture.
A Lambda-heavy startup and an EKS-based platform team need very different AWS interviews.
AWS Developer vs. Cloud Engineer: Which Should You Hire?
An AWS Developer focuses more heavily on building application software that uses AWS services.
A Cloud Engineer commonly focuses more heavily on:
- Infrastructure
- Networking
- Account configuration
- Cloud operations
- Platform standards
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.
AWS Developer vs. DevOps Engineer
A DevOps Engineer commonly focuses on:
- CI/CD
- Infrastructure automation
- Containers
- Monitoring
- Developer platforms
- Deployment
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.
AWS Developer vs. Back-End Developer
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:
- Lambda
- IAM
- SQS
- EventBridge
- CDK
- CloudWatch
Some positions combine both roles.
AWS Developer vs. Cloud Architect
A Cloud Architect generally focuses at a broader level.
Their work may include:
- Account architecture
- Organization structure
- Multi-region strategy
- Networking
- Governance
- Security standards
- Platform strategy
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.
AWS Developer vs. Site Reliability Engineer
A Site Reliability Engineer focuses heavily on:
- Availability
- Observability
- Incident response
- SLOs
- Operational automation
An AWS Developer may care about all of those areas while remaining primarily responsible for building application functionality.
How to Hire an AWS Developer Through South
South helps U.S. companies find AWS Developers across Latin America based on the applications, cloud services, programming languages, and infrastructure responsibilities involved.
1. Define the AWS Developer You Need
Start with the architecture.
Consider:
- Serverless or containers
- EC2, ECS, EKS, or Lambda
- Python, TypeScript, Java, or another language
- RDS or DynamoDB
- SQS/EventBridge
- Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation
- VPC networking
- CI/CD
- Bedrock or AI
- Seniority
A serverless developer building Lambda APIs needs a different background from someone maintaining Kubernetes workloads on EKS.
2. South Sources and Vets Candidates
South identifies AWS Developers across Latin America whose backgrounds align with your requirements.
Evaluation can include:
- AWS fundamentals
- Relevant services
- Programming
- IAM
- Networking
- Databases
- Infrastructure as code
- Observability
- Architecture
- Communication
- English proficiency
- Production experience
3. Review Pre-Vetted AWS Developers
You receive a focused selection of candidates rather than sorting through a large volume of generic cloud applications.
Compare their:
- AWS depth
- Programming languages
- Architecture experience
- Infrastructure tooling
- Production workloads
- Seniority
- Compensation
4. Interview Your Preferred Candidates
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.
5. Hire the AWS Developer Who Fits Your Team
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.
Why Hire AWS Developers From Latin America?
AWS Developers frequently collaborate with:
- Back-End Developers
- DevOps Engineers
- Site Reliability Engineers
- Security Engineers
- Data Engineers
- Product teams
Latin America's overlap with U.S. working hours supports:
- Architecture discussions
- Code reviews
- Infrastructure changes
- Deployment coordination
- Production troubleshooting
- Cost reviews
- Same-day incident response
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.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What does an AWS Developer do?
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.
How much does an AWS Developer cost?
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%.
What qualifications should an AWS Developer have?
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.
Does an AWS Developer need to know every AWS service?
No.
AWS has a very broad service portfolio.
Prioritize expertise in the services your application actually uses.
Does an AWS Developer need Terraform?
Terraform isn't mandatory if your team uses CDK or CloudFormation.
Infrastructure-as-code experience itself is usually more important than one specific tool.
Does an AWS Developer need an AWS certification?
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.
What's the difference between an AWS Developer and Cloud Engineer?
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.
When should I hire an AWS Developer?
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.
Can I hire AWS Developers in Latin America?
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.
Hire an AWS Developer With South
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.
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