Job fears for cloud engineers in finance: from "150 emails per day" to 20
Big Tech firms have been laying off engineers en masse to start 2026, and cloud staff are up for the axe. AWS staff were affected by Amazon's 16,000 layoffs in January, while there are unconfirmed reports that cloud infrastructure firm Oracle could lay off up to 30,000 people. Is the future of banking cloud jobs just as grim?
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Cloud engineers we've spoken to anonymously have mixed emotions. One former cloud engineer at a top US bank in New York told us there are "fears over job security" among cloud engineers and that job interviews are now few and far between. "There seems to be no traction from submitting applications," he said.
Another Cloud engineer at a US bank said "there has certainly been a downtick" in cloud hiring, but it hasn't disappeared entirely. He gets 20-30 emails per day and a few calls from recruiters, but this is "down from a peak during covid of a call every ~15 minutes and 150 emails per day."
Banks still have plenty of open job listings for cloud engineers. We've analyzed data for 14 major banks to see how many engineers are working directly on cloud infrastructure. There are over 1,300 jobs globally, including over 400 in the US. HSBC, Citi, BofA and JPMorgan each have over 100 cloud engineer listings, but the likes of BNP Paribas and UBS are hiring in much smaller numbers.
Cloud engineers were in vogue as banks begun their transformation efforts, dismantling legacy technology and bringing everything together on the cloud. Cloud engineering job security becomes more tentative as these transformations near completion, but maintaining AI architecture may have given them a lifeline. The second cloud engineer said "we're finding it still takes a lot of time to do work even with latest models at our side... I'm seeing an uptick in emails again."
Top cloud engineers may be more valued in other financial firms, however. The New York engineer said he'd been invited to just one interview at a bank in the past six months, but had received "maybe four invitations to interview with hedge funds." These roles are often more than just cloud engineering, though; Citadel's site reliability engineering (SRE) team work on cloud architecture, Linux systems engineering, incident response and more.
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