Hire AWS Developers

Ideaware places senior, dedicated AWS developers from Latin America on US engineering teams. Each one works full time on your product and nobody else’s. You see vetted cloud engineers within 48 hours, your pick starts 8–12 days after the first call, and they work your business hours, which matters when production breaks at 2 p.m. Eastern. A senior AWS developer costs $5,000–8,000 a month, with payroll, benefits and equipment included.

“AWS developer” covers two jobs: engineers who write application code on Lambda, DynamoDB and SQS, and engineers who own the account itself, from VPCs and IAM to Terraform and cost. Tell us which one you need. We screen for the right half.

What an AWS developer costs in the US

A US AWS developer earns an average base salary of $123,346 in 2026, with reported pay from $92,000 to $230,000, according to Built In’s salary data. The BLS median for all software developers is $135,980 (May 2025).

Base pay leaves out benefits, which make up 30% of employer compensation costs in US private industry (BLS, June 2026). Agency recruiters then add a placement fee.

	US in-house hire	Ideaware
Pay	$92,000–230,000 base salary	$5,000–8,000 a month
Benefits, payroll tax, equipment	Paid by you on top of salary	Included
Placement fee	Common with agencies	None
First candidates	Depends on your pipeline	48 hours

With benefits and fees counted, teams save 40–60% against a comparable US hire. The developer cost guide breaks this down by role.

The AWS stack our developers work in

Our AWS developers manage production accounts, write their infrastructure as code and review IAM policies before they merge. Most profiles cover:

Compute: Lambda, ECS on Fargate, EKS, EC2 with Auto Scaling
Data: RDS and Aurora PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, S3 with lifecycle rules
Networking and edge: VPC design, Route 53, CloudFront, API Gateway, ALB
Infrastructure as code: Terraform (most common), AWS CDK, CloudFormation, Pulumi
Integration: SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions
Security: IAM roles and policies, KMS, Secrets Manager, GuardDuty, Security Hub; SOC 2 and HIPAA controls
Delivery and monitoring: GitHub Actions or CodePipeline, CloudWatch, X-Ray, Datadog

Many clients pair an AWS hire with a backend developer in Go, Python or Node.js, so application code and infrastructure move together.

AWS services clients hire for

Most requests name a service before they name a seniority. These come up most, and our developers have run each in production:

ElastiCache: Redis or Valkey clusters for sessions, rate limits and hot queries; cache invalidation that doesn’t serve stale data; failover testing before a node dies on its own
IAM: least-privilege roles per service, permission boundaries, cross-account access with AWS Organizations and IAM Identity Center, and cleaning up the wildcard policies an early team left behind
SNS and SQS: fan-out from one event to many consumers, dead-letter queues, FIFO topics where order matters, and alerts when a queue backs up
Athena: SQL over S3 data lakes, partitioning and Parquet so queries scan less data, Glue catalogs, and query costs you can predict
EC2: right-sized instance families, Auto Scaling groups with launch templates, Spot for batch work, and the move to containers or Lambda when EC2 no longer fits
AWS CLI and automation: scripts and CI jobs that replace console clicks, with named profiles and short-lived credentials in place of access keys on laptops

How we vet AWS developers

We accept about 3% of applicants. AWS candidates pass five steps: an async technical assessment, a 90-minute live session, an architecture review of a past project, an English and communication interview, and reference checks with former managers.

The AWS rounds test judgment more than service trivia:

Architecture: designing a multi-AZ setup for a real workload and defending the cost against a simpler option
IAM and network security: least-privilege policies, security groups versus NACLs, keeping databases out of public subnets
Infrastructure as code: Terraform module design, remote state and locking, and how to change production without drift
Cost: reading a Cost Explorer breakdown and finding the right-sizing, Savings Plans or storage-class changes
Operations: a live incident scenario with CloudWatch alarms, logs and X-Ray traces
Serverless limits: Lambda cold starts, concurrency limits, timeouts and when a container is the better choice

We verify AWS certifications when candidates list them, but we weigh production experience above the certificate.

AWS developer or DevOps engineer: which hire do you need?

Hire an AWS developer when your product runs on AWS and you need someone who builds on its services and owns the account design. A different profile fits better when:

You run Kubernetes, CI/CD and on-call across more than one cloud: hire a DevOps engineer.
The work is pipelines, warehouses and Glue or Redshift jobs: hire a data engineer.
You need API code more than infrastructure: hire a backend developer.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to hire an AWS developer?

A senior AWS developer through Ideaware costs $5,000–8,000 a month, all-in. US AWS developers average $123,346 in base salary in 2026 (Built In), before benefits and recruiting fees. See the cost guide for other roles.

How fast can an AWS developer start?

You see vetted profiles within 48 hours. Most developers start 8–12 days after the first call, depending on how fast you interview.

Do your AWS developers have certifications?

Many hold AWS Solutions Architect, Developer or DevOps Engineer certifications, and we verify them. If a client contract or compliance audit requires a certification, tell us and we only send certified candidates.

Do we need an AWS developer or an AWS architect?

An AWS developer builds and ships on AWS: Lambda functions, data access, queues and the Terraform around them. An architect designs the account structure, networking and security model and signs off on big changes. Senior AWS developers can do both for most startups. Hire a dedicated architect when you run several accounts or regions or face a compliance audit.

How do we test AWS skills in an interview?

Give candidates a scenario from your own system, such as a slow endpoint or a surprise bill, and ask them to walk through how they would find the cause. Ask them to defend one architecture decision from a past project, including its cost. Certifications show study; a walkthrough shows judgment. We run these rounds before you meet anyone, and you can add your own.

Can they also work with Azure or Google Cloud?

Some can. Terraform and Kubernetes skills transfer across clouds, but each provider has its own IAM, networking and pricing quirks. If you run more than one cloud, ask for candidates with production experience on each.

Can an AWS developer lower our cloud bill?

Cost review is part of our vetting, so yes, it is a fair first project. Expect them to start with tagging and a Cost Explorer review, then right-size instances, move storage classes and weigh Savings Plans against your usage.

What happens if the developer isn't a fit?

We replace them at no cost within the first 90 days. After that you can scale down with 30 days’ notice and no placement fees.

Get AWS candidates in 48 hours →