How to hire an AWS developer: skills, services and interview questions
Many teams run on AWS, but fewer know how to judge an AWS developer. This guide covers the role, the skills to test, what to ask in the interview, what affects the price and how to start safely. If you also need wider server or release work, look at our back-end developers and software engineers, which cover DevOps and cloud roles too.
What an AWS developer does
An AWS developer builds software made to run on Amazon Web Services. They lean on managed services: Lambda for code that runs on demand, API Gateway for the API, S3 for files, DynamoDB or RDS for data, and SQS or Kinesis to pass work along. They also write the setup as code, so a new environment takes one command, not an afternoon of clicking.
AWS is the cloud platform developers use most. In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, 43.3 percent of all respondents said they had done extensive development work with AWS in the past year, ahead of Microsoft Azure at 26.3 percent and Google Cloud at 24.6 percent. That gives you a wide pool of candidates.
Skills to check
- Code first: solid Python, TypeScript, Java or Go, with tests and clear error handling.
- Serverless: Lambda limits such as timeouts and cold starts, and when a container is the wiser choice.
- Data: DynamoDB tables designed around access patterns, or RDS with sensible indexes and backups.
- Security: IAM roles with only the access they need, and no secrets in the code.
- Infrastructure as code: CloudFormation, CDK or Terraform, reviewed in pull requests like any other change.
- Running the system: CloudWatch logs, metrics and alarms, and a habit of checking the bill.
Five interview questions
- Describe a system you built on AWS. Which services did you choose, and which would you swap now?
- A Lambda function behind API Gateway is slow on some requests. How do you find the cause?
- How would you give one service access to a single S3 bucket and nothing else?
- Our AWS bill jumped last month. Where do you look first?
- Think of an outage you were part of. What happened, and what changed afterwards?
Strong candidates answer with real examples, raise limits and costs without being asked, and admit what went wrong.
A sample job description
For example: “We are hiring an AWS developer to own the back end of our booking platform. You will write Lambda functions in TypeScript, design DynamoDB tables, manage our setup with AWS CDK and keep our GitHub Actions pipeline healthy. Required: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB and IAM in a live product. Helpful: ECS, Kinesis and Terraform.”
What drives the cost
The price depends mostly on seniority, location, hours and how much of your platform the person will own. Someone who can design accounts, networks and a safe release process costs more than a developer adding features to a working setup. US pay sits at the high end: the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median for software developers at 135,980 US dollars a year, as of May 2025. Developers based in India, South Africa, Eastern Europe or Latin America usually cost less.
Plan for the AWS bill as well. A careful developer tags resources, sets budgets and switches off what nobody uses.
Give access safely
A new developer needs access, but not to everything on day one. Give them a personal login through IAM Identity Center, never a shared root account. Start with full access to a development account and read-only access to production, and keep CloudTrail on so every change can be traced.
Ask for a piece of paid work
At the end of the interviews, ask the strongest one or two people on your shortlist to do a few hours of paid, real work, such as an endpoint that saves a record to DynamoDB, with the infrastructure as code and a test. Notice how they ask questions, whether secrets stay out of the repository and whether they explain how to deploy it.
Freelance or dedicated
Freelance AWS developers suit a fixed job, such as one migration. Cloud systems keep changing, though: services gain features, costs drift and old resources pile up. A dedicated developer who knows your accounts keeps all of that under control.
The first three months
During the first weeks, share your architecture diagram and runbooks, and give one small task that ends in production, so the developer sees the full release path. In the first month, ask them to list what is running and what each part costs. By the third month they should own one area, such as the API or the data pipeline.
Mistakes to avoid
- Judging candidates by the number of AWS services on their CV instead of what they have built and run.
- Setting things up by hand in the console, so nobody can rebuild them later.
- Ignoring cost until the bill arrives, instead of asking for budgets and alerts from the start.
- Hiring a developer when you really need someone to run networks and accounts, or the other way round.
Getting ready for the interviews? Our DevOps interview questions cover the pipeline and infrastructure side, and the offshore software outsourcing guide compares the wider options for a remote team.