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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

💰 $ - $

CloudDevOpsInfrastructurePlatform Engineering

🎯 Role Definition

The Cloud Infrastructure Engineer is responsible for designing, building, operating, and optimizing scalable, secure, and highly available cloud platforms and services. This role combines Infrastructure as Code (IaC), cloud-native architecture, automation, observability, cost optimization and strong security practices to enable engineering teams to deliver reliable applications. Typical day-to-day responsibilities include managing Kubernetes clusters, writing Terraform modules, automating CI/CD pipelines, implementing monitoring and logging, enforcing cloud security and compliance, and collaborating cross-functionally to deliver platform capabilities that accelerate product development.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Cloud Engineer / Cloud Operations Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
  • System Administrator or Network Engineer transitioning to cloud

Advancement To:

  • Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer / Lead Cloud Engineer
  • Platform Engineering Manager / Head of Platform
  • Cloud Architect / Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Cloud Security Engineer / DevSecOps
  • Data Platform Engineer / Kubernetes Platform Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain scalable, resilient cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates) to support microservices, serverless, and containerized workloads across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
  • Build, operate, and optimize Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE or self-managed) including cluster lifecycle, node management, autoscaling, resource requests/limits, and upgrade strategies to maintain high availability and performance.
  • Architect and manage CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI) for automated build, test, deployment, and rollback, implementing Blue/Green and Canary deployment patterns to minimize downtime.
  • Implement robust identity and access management policies (IAM roles/policies, least privilege, RBAC) and integrate SSO/IdP (SAML, OIDC) for secure access control across cloud accounts and platforms.
  • Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules, reusable templates, and policy-as-code (OPA, Sentinel) for consistent environment provisioning, drift detection, and governance.
  • Automate operational runbooks, routine cloud tasks, and day-2 operations using scripting (Python, Go, Bash) and automation tools (Ansible, Terraform, Pulumi) to reduce toil and increase reliability.
  • Design and operate secure networking (VPC/VNet design, subnets, routing, NAT, security groups, NACLs), load balancing (ALB/ELB/NGINX), and hybrid connectivity (VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute) for multi-environment architectures.
  • Implement observability and monitoring solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch) with alerting, dashboards, and SLO/SLA tracking to detect, triage, and resolve incidents quickly.
  • Manage centralized logging and tracing (ELK/EFK, Loki, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger) to enable faster root cause analysis and correlation across distributed systems.
  • Lead cloud migration and modernization projects, including lift-and-shift, replatforming, and refactoring initiatives, providing migration plans, cost estimates, and rollout strategies.
  • Enforce security and compliance controls (encryption at rest/in transit, key management with KMS/HSM, secret management with Vault/Secrets Manager), and support audits (SOC2, PCI, HIPAA) and vulnerability remediation.
  • Drive cost optimization and capacity management: rightsizing instances, spot/commit usage, cost allocation tags, budgets, and forecasting to meet financial targets while maintaining performance.
  • Create and maintain runbooks, architecture diagrams, and operational documentation for systems, deployments, and incident response procedures to ensure knowledge sharing and continuity.
  • Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, postmortem analysis, and continuous improvement to reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR) and recurring incidents.
  • Implement service mesh and advanced networking patterns (Istio/Linkerd/Consul) for secure service-to-service communication, observability, and traffic management where appropriate.
  • Collaborate with application engineering teams to define platform APIs, developer self-service tooling, and pipelines that accelerate secure and compliant deployments.
  • Build and maintain backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity strategies including cross-region replication, automated backups, and regular restore testing.
  • Implement backup and retention policies, lifecycle management, and data protection strategies for cloud storage (S3, Blob Storage, GCS) and databases.
  • Monitor, tune, and improve system performance and reliability through profiling, capacity planning, and infrastructure-level optimizations.
  • Maintain and improve configuration management systems and ensure consistent baseline configurations across environments using Ansible, Chef, or SaltStack where applicable.
  • Integrate and manage secrets and certificate lifecycle, automate rotation, and ensure secure distribution to workloads and CI systems.
  • Evaluate, select, and pilot new cloud services and third-party tools to modernize the platform and reduce operational overhead while aligning with security and cost constraints.
  • Mentor and coach junior engineers, run knowledge-sharing sessions, and contribute to hiring and onboarding processes to grow the platform team.
  • Collaborate with security, compliance, and product teams to translate business requirements into secure, scalable, and maintainable cloud solutions.

Secondary Functions

  • Provide technical support for ad-hoc cloud infrastructure requests, troubleshooting escalations, and environment troubleshooting to ensure developer productivity.
  • Contribute to the organization's cloud platform roadmap, identify refactoring and hardening opportunities, and help prioritize platform investments.
  • Work with product and business stakeholders to translate feature requirements into cloud architecture decisions and deployment plans.
  • Participate actively in Agile ceremonies (sprint planning, standups, retrospectives) and partner with cross-functional teams to deliver platform improvements.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience with at least one major public cloud provider: AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, VPC), Azure (VMs, Storage, AAD), or GCP (Compute Engine, GKE, IAM).
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) expertise with Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM, or Pulumi; ability to write reusable modules and enforce state management.
  • Container orchestration and runtime experience: Kubernetes administration (EKS/AKS/GKE), Helm charts, Docker containerization best practices.
  • CI/CD pipeline design and automation: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, ArgoCD, Spinnaker.
  • Configuration management and automation: Ansible, Chef, Salt, or similar.
  • Scripting and programming: Python, Bash, and/or Go for automation, tooling, and custom integrations.
  • Observability, logging and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Datadog, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry.
  • Security fundamentals: IAM, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), encryption, KMS, vulnerability scanning and remediation.
  • Networking and connectivity: VPC/VNet design, routing, load balancers, NAT, VPN, Direct Connect/ExpressRoute, firewalls and service meshes.
  • Storage and databases: S3/Blob Storage/GCS, EBS, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB/Cloud Spanner familiarity, backup and lifecycle management.
  • High availability, disaster recovery, and failover strategies: cross-region replication, multi-AZ deployments, and automated recovery.
  • Cost management and optimization: tagging strategies, cost explorer/billing tools, rightsizing, reserved/spot instances.
  • Identity and access management and federation: SSO, SAML, OIDC, RBAC in Kubernetes.
  • Container networking and service meshes: Istio, Linkerd, or Consul.
  • Policy-as-code and governance tooling: OPA, Sentinel, Conftest, or equivalent.

Soft Skills

  • Strong verbal and written communication for cross-functional collaboration, documentation, and postmortems.
  • Problem-solving mindset and investigative skills for complex distributed systems and incident triage.
  • Customer-focused: ability to translate developer and business needs into platform features and SLAs.
  • Ownership and initiative: proactive in identifying platform debt, automation opportunities, and operational risks.
  • Mentorship and teamwork: ability to coach junior engineers, run workshops, and foster a collaborative culture.
  • Project management and prioritization: handle multiple initiatives, deliver on roadmap commitments, and balance reliability vs. speed.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: keeps up with cloud innovations and evaluates new technologies against company goals.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related technical discipline OR equivalent practical experience (cloud certifications and proven track record).

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, Software Engineering, or related fields.
  • Relevant certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Google Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Cloud Computing
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Security
  • Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8+ years working in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles; senior roles often expect 5+ years.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years hands-on experience designing and operating production cloud infrastructure.
  • Demonstrated experience with IaC, Kubernetes administration, CI/CD automation, cloud networking, and security/compliance in cloud environments.
  • Proven track record of delivering platform services, reducing operational toil through automation, and participating in incident response and postmortem processes.
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