Senior cloud talent and rates in Automotive
Senior cloud engineers serving automotive run roughly $125–$180/hr. Stack realities for this combination: CDK / Reynolds DMS + AutoTrader feeds + Salesforce Auto Cloud — common integrations: CDK / Reynolds / Tekion DMS, AutoTrader + Cars.com inventory feeds, CarFax + Kelley Blue Book. Connected-car telemetry; OTA update orchestration
What cloud actually requires in 2026
2026 cloud: AWS still dominates 30%+ market share, GCP excels for AI/ML + data, Azure for enterprise + Microsoft-shop. Modern shops use Terraform + AWS CDK or Pulumi for IaC, Kubernetes for orchestration, and combinations of managed services (RDS, ElastiCache, S3) with custom workloads. Real cloud architects hold AWS Solutions Architect Pro / GCP Professional Cloud Architect / Azure Solutions Architect Expert and have shipped >2 production migrations end-to-end. "AWS certified solutions architect associate" is entry-level — necessary but not sufficient for senior work.