How to Apply for Cloud Engineering Jobs Without Experience

What “no experience” actually means to a hiring manager

When a job posting says “1–2 years of cloud engineering experience required,” it is stating a preference, not a filter. Hiring managers use experience requirements as a rough proxy for competence — they don’t want to interview people who have never opened a cloud console. But the proxy is imprecise, and many hiring managers will look at candidates without formal experience if those candidates can demonstrate competence through other means.

The question is not “do you have the job title in your history?” but “can you do the job?” If you can provide credible evidence that you can — through projects, certifications, hands-on training, or relevant transferable work — many hiring managers will take you seriously.

What they are genuinely concerned about: will this person need hand-holding on things a more experienced candidate would not? Will they understand production consequences? Can they work with real infrastructure without causing problems? If you can address those concerns through your application materials, the formal experience requirement becomes less of a barrier.

What substitutes for professional experience at each stage

The application screening stage

At the application screening stage, you need enough on your CV to pass the initial filter — whether that’s an ATS system or a recruiter doing a quick scan. The substitutes for professional cloud experience that are respected at this stage:

• Certifications. The AWS Solutions Architect – Associate, the GCP Associate Cloud Engineer, or the CKA are meaningful signals. Entry-level certs (Cloud Practitioner, AZ-900) are useful but not sufficient on their own.
• Real self-built projects on GitHub. A publicly visible Terraform project that deploys a real infrastructure setup is direct evidence of capability. It is not the same as professional experience, but it is not nothing either.
• Relevant prior work experience. If your previous work involved any IT infrastructure, system administration, networking, software development, or DevOps-adjacent work, extract and highlight those elements explicitly. “Managed Linux servers for 20 clients” is cloud-adjacent. “Wrote Python automation scripts” is cloud-adjacent.

The phone screen stage

If you get to a recruiter phone screen, you will typically be asked about your experience and why you’re applying. The substitution that works here is a clear and honest story: “I’ve spent the past eight months learning cloud specifically — I have the SAA certification, I’ve built a three-tier Terraform deployment on AWS that I can walk through, and I’ve been doing home lab work with Kubernetes. I’m looking for an entry-level role where I can apply these in a professional environment.”

This is more compelling than trying to oversell experience you don’t have. Honest self-presentation with evidence works better than vague claims at this stage.

The technical interview stage

If you reach a technical interview without formal experience, the hiring team has already decided you’re worth evaluating. At this stage, you are no longer disadvantaged by the experience gap — you are being assessed on what you can demonstrate in the interview. Preparation matters significantly more than background here.

See the separate entry-level cloud jobs guide for what hiring managers at this stage are actually evaluating.

Where to apply when you don’t have experience

Not all roles have equal barriers to entry. Where you apply significantly affects your success rate.

Cloud support roles at hyperscalers

AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure all hire cloud support engineers — roles where you help customers troubleshoot cloud issues. These roles are explicitly entry-level, value certifications and learning ability, and provide direct exposure to real-world cloud infrastructure at scale. They are a legitimate entry point to a cloud engineering career.

The work is support-oriented rather than engineering-focused, but the experience you gain is real and the companies provide significant training resources. Many cloud engineers started in support roles at hyperscalers.

Managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud consultancies

MSPs that manage cloud infrastructure for multiple clients often hire entry-level engineers and train them. The learning curve is fast because you work across multiple clients and environments. The pay is often lower than product companies at the same level, but the breadth of experience you gain is significant.

Small startups and scale-ups

Early-stage companies sometimes prefer enthusiasm and learning ability over polished experience, particularly if they are building their cloud infrastructure from scratch. They are more willing to take a risk on someone with strong fundamentals and good projects who hasn’t yet had a title. The trade-off: less mentorship, less structured environment, and more direct exposure to the consequences of your decisions.

Graduate schemes and apprenticeships

Several larger technology companies run formal cloud engineering graduate schemes or apprenticeships. These are designed for people without professional experience and provide structured training alongside the work. They are competitive, but the selection process typically focuses on aptitude rather than prior experience.

Where not to start

Applying directly to senior or mid-level roles at large enterprises with formal experience requirements is unlikely to produce results when you’re starting out. These roles have enough qualified applicants that there is no reason for a hiring manager to take a risk on someone without the background. Focus your effort where your application is genuinely competitive.

How to frame your application honestly

The temptation when you lack experience is to either underplay yourself or to overstate. Neither works well.

Underplaying yourself looks like: burying your projects at the bottom of your CV, writing a summary that says “aspiring cloud engineer looking for an opportunity to learn” (which signals you don’t have skills), or apologising for your background in a cover letter.

Overstating yourself looks like: describing tutorial projects as professional deployments, listing skills you cannot discuss in an interview, or claiming familiarity with tools you have only read about.

The honest framing that works: you have specific skills (certifications, projects, tools) at a specific level (junior, learning), you are looking for a role where you can apply and grow them, and you can point to evidence of both the skills and the learning ability.

This is a coherent, credible position. You are not pretending to be something you’re not. You are making the case that your evidence of capability is sufficient to be worth interviewing.

Getting your first experience without being hired

If you are consistently failing at the application screening stage, you may need to build more credible evidence before applying again. Options that add legitimate experience to your profile:

• Open source contributions. Contributing to cloud-related open source projects gives you real collaborative technical work that you can point to. Terraform providers, Kubernetes tooling, and infrastructure-as-code tools are all areas where contributions are valued.
• Freelancing or voluntary work. Helping a small organisation with their cloud setup — even unpaid — produces real experience with real infrastructure and real constraints. A non-profit or small business that needs basic AWS setup is an opportunity.
• Expanding your lab environment. Home lab projects that go beyond simple deployments — monitoring, security hardening, multi-account setups, CI/CD pipelines — add credibility to your portfolio.

The goal is to move from “studied and has certifications” to “has done real work at some scale” — even if that scale is small.