EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, RDS, Lambda, CloudFront, ECS/EKS, CloudWatch, costs, Well-Architected.
Before starting, we run a 1-minute tech check — microphone, ambient noise, connection. If your setup isn't good enough, the test is fully refunded.
Prove you can architect on AWS, not just deploy to it: a 15-minute AI oral gives you a verified score to share with recruiters and clients.
The Plume AWS badge tests your hands-on mastery of Amazon Web Services through a 15-minute live oral exam conducted by an AI examiner. The session covers the core pillars of modern AWS architecture: compute with EC2 and Lambda, storage with S3, networking with VPC and CloudFront, container orchestration with ECS and EKS, managed databases with RDS and DynamoDB, security with IAM permission boundaries and Service Control Policies, observability with CloudWatch and X-Ray, and cost governance with Savings Plans and Cost Explorer. The AI does not quiz you on textbook definitions -- it digs into your architectural trade-offs, your incident retrospectives, and your real reasoning under pressure.
What makes this badge credible is that you cannot fake a live oral. On LinkedIn, anyone can tick "AWS". Here, the AI will ask you to justify why you chose EKS over ECS Fargate, how you cap your NAT Gateway bill in a multi-AZ setup, or how you structure IAM roles to enforce least privilege across a multi-account AWS Organizations environment. The transcript is then scored by Claude Opus, which produces a 0-100 rating and a certified level: Novice, Proficient, Advanced or Expert -- with a detailed breakdown by evaluation dimension.
This badge is built for backend and fullstack engineers who deploy on AWS, DevOps and SRE engineers who run cloud infrastructure in production, cloud architects who design Well-Architected systems, and freelancers or consultants who need to prove their AWS depth to new clients before the first call. Whether you are prepping for a job interview, a contract negotiation, or a personal skills audit, the Plume AWS badge gives you a timestamped, shareable, tamper-proof credential.
Here are the concrete dimensions the AI examines during the 15-minute oral.
Ability to combine EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, CloudFront and API Gateway into a coherent architecture, justifying each service choice based on business context, scalability requirements and operational constraints.
Designing roles, policies, permission boundaries and Service Control Policies for multi-account AWS Organizations environments. Avoiding wildcard permissions in production and applying least-privilege at scale.
Structuring public and private subnets, routing tables, NAT Gateways, VPC endpoints (Gateway vs Interface), Security Groups, NACLs and Transit Gateway to minimize cost and attack surface across multi-AZ setups.
Making a reasoned choice between Lambda, ECS Fargate and EKS based on latency, execution duration, portability and cost. Understanding cold starts, concurrency limits, task definitions and Kubernetes node groups.
Using CloudWatch Logs, custom metrics, alarms, dashboards and X-Ray to diagnose EC2 saturation, Lambda throttling or RDS overload in live production scenarios, not just in staging environments.
Integrating AWS into pipelines via Terraform, AWS CDK or CloudFormation, combined with GitHub Actions or CodePipeline. Managing secrets with Secrets Manager or Parameter Store and preventing infrastructure drift.
Reading and optimizing AWS bills: Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, EC2 rightsizing, identifying orphaned resources, and using Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets to stay within project and team envelopes.
Applying the six pillars of the Well-Architected Framework, knowing recent AWS innovations like Graviton3, S3 Express One Zone and Bedrock, and being able to compare AWS with GCP or Azure to guide a platform decision.
Final scoring is performed by Claude (Anthropic), which reads back the full transcript and applies this weighted criteria grid.
The examiner checks that you use exact AWS terminology (e.g., task definition vs ECS service, permission boundary vs SCP) and that your explanations reflect real hands-on experience with the services, not a surface-level reading of the docs.
You need to show you can weigh competing concerns: cost vs latency, scalability vs operational complexity, managed vs self-hosted. Binary answers without nuance are penalized; thoughtful trade-off reasoning is rewarded.
Your ability to walk through a real incident -- its diagnosis via CloudWatch or X-Ray, corrective actions, and preventive measures adopted afterward -- reflects operational maturity that the score weights heavily.
IAM hygiene, secrets management, network segmentation and familiarity with services like GuardDuty, Security Hub and AWS Config are assessed through the concrete examples you provide during the oral.
Knowing when to advise against Lambda or even against AWS altogether, being aware of recent launches like Graviton or Bedrock, and positioning AWS vs GCP vs Azure shows expertise that goes beyond execution.
A Plume session takes about 20 minutes, from tech check to badge delivery.
Your mic and connection are tested before anything starts. The AI confirms audio is being captured correctly. No camera needed -- just a working microphone and a quiet room with a stable internet connection.
You give a brief intro and walk the AI through your most recent or most complex AWS project: the context, the services involved, and your concrete role in the architecture. This sets the stage for the deep-dive that follows.
The AI examiner fires 4 to 6 targeted questions covering IAM, VPC, compute (EC2, Lambda, ECS, EKS), storage, observability, CI/CD and costs. It follows up on your answers to probe your reasoning and find where your knowledge has edges.
You share your take on a recent AWS development (Graviton, S3 Express One Zone, Bedrock) or explain when you would steer a client away from AWS entirely. This question surfaces your strategic perspective and how actively you follow the ecosystem.
Claude Opus reads the transcript and generates your 0-100 score with a certified level. You get a detailed report, a private audio recording of your session, and a shareable badge URL to post on LinkedIn or attach to proposals.
Your score out of 100 translates into a level a recruiter can grasp at a glance.
You know the AWS basics -- EC2, S3, IAM -- from tutorials or courses, but you have not shipped infrastructure in production. You can create resources from the console but are not yet comfortable with IaC, VPC design or security boundaries.
You regularly deploy on AWS in production: you have solid command of EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda and basic IAM. You have written Terraform or CloudFormation, you can read CloudWatch logs, and you handle common incidents, though you still reference the docs for advanced configurations.
You design multi-service architectures with multi-AZ VPCs, ECS or EKS clusters, IAM permission boundaries, and CI/CD pipelines integrating Terraform or CDK. You optimize costs with Savings Plans and rightsizing, and you diagnose complex incidents using X-Ray and CloudWatch Insights.
You define Well-Architected architectures across multi-account AWS Organizations, govern costs and end-to-end security with GuardDuty, Security Hub and SCPs, evaluate emerging services like Graviton and Bedrock, and make the case for AWS vs GCP vs Azure at the executive level.
No degree or years of experience required to take the badge. Here are the profiles it makes the most sense for.
You deploy your apps on AWS using Lambda, ECS, RDS and S3, and you want to prove you go beyond just keeping things running in prod -- you understand cost, security, and network design.
You run production AWS infrastructure with Terraform or CDK, you drive CloudWatch incident response, and the badge gives you a credential that captures what AWS Associate or Pro certifications do not always reflect in real-world situations.
You design multi-account distributed systems and apply the Well-Architected Framework. You need a credible proof point for RFPs, rate negotiations or client pitches that goes beyond listing certification logos on a slide.
A new client cannot verify your AWS depth from a resume alone. Your Plume badge gives them a URL with your score and level before the first call, so the conversation starts from a place of established trust.
You just finished an AWS training program or you are preparing for a certification, and you want a way to stand out from other candidates without waiting to accumulate years of production experience.
Where and how your AWS badge will help you day to day.
You are interviewing for a Cloud Engineer role. You share your Plume AWS badge score and report before the technical round, which reassures the hiring manager about your actual level and shifts the conversation toward advanced topics from the start.
You pitch a daily rate to a new client who pushes back on the price. You send your badge URL showing an Advanced score on AWS, which grounds your positioning in objective evidence and shortens the negotiation.
Your consultancy is bidding on an AWS migration project. Each engineer attaches their Plume AWS badge to the proposal, giving the client a verifiable picture of the team's actual capability beyond certification logos.
You just completed an AWS Solutions Architect course. You take the Plume badge to measure objectively where you stand before going near production, and use the detailed report to target the gaps worth closing first.
You add your badge URL to your LinkedIn profile and personal site. Recruiters and clients who click it see your score, your level and the date of the assessment -- a timestamped, unfakeable signal of real competency.
A CTO needs to map the AWS proficiency of an eight-person engineering team before kicking off an EKS migration. Each engineer takes the Plume badge and the CTO gets a comparable, objective breakdown to plan targeted training.
A few minutes to check you have everything you need.
At the end of your session you don't just get a score — here's everything that awaits you.
You get a precise score out of 100 and an official level (Novice, Proficient, Advanced or Expert) that reflects your real AWS mastery -- not a checkbox on a form or a multiple-choice pass/fail.
The report highlights your strengths (e.g., strong IAM strategy) and your improvement areas (e.g., NAT Gateway cost optimization), grounded in what you actually said during your oral session.
Your oral is stored securely and accessible only to you. You can replay it to analyze your answers, spot hesitations, and sharpen your explanations before your next session or a real interview.
A public page showing your AWS score, your level and the date of the assessment. Share it on LinkedIn, in a job application email, or in a client proposal to prove your expertise with a single link.
Discover related skills you can validate with Plume.
A 15-min oral exam with an AI, a shareable badge for your recruiters.
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