(Not the OP) If cloud equates in your mind to expensive, then you were probably using the cloud wrong. Using AWS (for example) as a data-center and self hosting on EC2 can be pretty expensive compared to just getting a few dedicated boxes. The point of cloud architecture with tools like terraform are meant to be able to have resources be torn down and scaled down when they are unnecessary. You can't scale down bare metal, and you can't scale it up either automatically. If you have a consistent workload and know exactly what you need on any given day/time and for any given number of clients and can predict what you need - bare metal is honestly not a bad choice.

Edit: Just realized I didn't answer your initial question in the post: A cloud architect, who comes from an engineering background, is more along the lines of what you would need versus just a pure ops person. My last company was a small company (startup mentality) and as chief architect I was able to design our cloud architecture as well as write code on our projects when my developers were struggling to meet deadlines.