Any level

AI & Cloud Career

Certifications, salary data, and interview material, what actually moves a cloud or AI career.

Who this is for

Engineers deciding where to spend the next six months of study.

What you should be able to do

Choose a credential path with a defensible return and prepare for the interview behind it.

Career ladder

The titles this track maps onto. Levels differ between companies. The useful part is the direction, and what each step adds to the one before it.

Learner
Associate
Professional
Specialist
Architect / Lead

Tech stack

What the work is actually done with. Grouped by the job each tool does, so the list reads as a system rather than a pile of names.

Certifications: AWSAzureGoogle CloudCKA / CKSTerraform Associate
Portfolio: Public reposReference architecturesWrite-ups
Interview: System designTake-homeBehavioural
Market: Salary benchmarksRemote hiringRegional demand

The delivery flow

The order the work actually happens in. Each step is where a decision gets made and written down, not a chapter heading.

Skills baseline
Target role
Certification choice
Study plan
Portfolio project
Interview prep
Salary benchmark
Negotiation

Reference repository structure

A starting layout for this track. The directories are the ones that get added late and hurt. Decisions, evals, policy, lineage. Promoted to the top level where they are visible.

portfolio/
├── README.md              # what you built and the decision you made
├── projects/
│   └── <project>/
│       ├── architecture.md
│       ├── decisions.md   # the tradeoff, not just the stack
│       └── infra/
├── write-ups/             # one per project, explaining the why
├── certifications/
└── interview-prep/
    ├── system-design/
    └── stories.md         # STAR, with real numbers

Reading path

12 published guides on this track. Every one is a live page on this site. Nothing here is a placeholder.

Reference implementations

Citadel’s open-source repositories for this track. Terraform modules, MCP servers, and reference architectures you can read, fork, and run. Apache/MIT licensed; check each repository for its terms.

Primary sources

The standards, framework documents, and vendor references this track is built against. Go here when you need the authoritative wording rather than a summary. In a security review or an audit, the source is what counts.

Other tracks

Talk through this with an architect