Reposting a response I wrote to a user on Amazon’s EC2 forum who is having a hard time finding good engineers with AWS experience:
If there aren’t enough talented engineers who already know AWS, consider hiring talented engineers who can learn AWS.
You might find that there are existing AWS experts who aren’t looking for a full time job, but who are willing to be consulting resources to help bring your talent quickly up to speed with the ins and outs of building systems appropriately on AWS and to help answer questions and solve problems as they arise.
You should be aware that given the current growth of AWS, your engineers will be in high demand once they have AWS experience, so treat them well :)
Please do encourage your new talent to be active in the community too. It not only helps others, but it also significantly improves their own skills and expertise. I learned a lot of what I know about AWS by trying to solve other people’s problems.