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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Infrastructure Engineer

💰 $ - $

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Infrastructure Engineer is responsible for designing, building, automating, and operating scalable cloud and on-premises infrastructure to support continuous delivery and high-availability production systems. This role blends systems engineering, software delivery automation, infrastructure as code (IaC), and observability to enable fast, reliable, and secure releases. The ideal candidate partners closely with development, security, and platform teams to drive platform reliability, cost efficiency, and operational excellence across public cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) and container orchestration environments such as Kubernetes.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator with automation experience
  • Cloud Engineer or Platform Engineer transitioning to DevOps
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Build/Release Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer / Staff DevOps Engineer
  • Platform Engineering Lead or SRE Team Lead
  • Cloud Architect or Infrastructure Architect
  • Engineering Manager for Platform/SRE teams

Lateral Moves:

  • Security Engineer (Cloud/SecOps)
  • Release Manager or CI/CD Specialist
  • Automation Engineer or Developer in Test (DevTestOps)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain robust, highly available cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation to provision AWS, Azure, or GCP resources in a repeatable, auditable manner.
  • Build, operate, and optimize CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or other tools to automate application build, test, and deployment processes for multiple environments (dev, staging, production).
  • Architect and manage containerized workloads on Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) and maintain cluster lifecycle, autoscaling, multi-cluster strategies, and upgrade processes to ensure zero-downtime deployments.
  • Develop and maintain configuration management and automation frameworks using Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or SaltStack to enforce consistency across servers and container images.
  • Implement observability solutions including centralized logging (ELK/EFK, Splunk), metrics (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog), and tracing (Jaeger, AWS X-Ray) to provide actionable insights into system performance and reliability.
  • Define and implement robust monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices, including runbooks, on-call rotations, post-incident reviews, and continuous improvement of SLOs/SLAs.
  • Harden infrastructure and enforce cloud security best practices by implementing IAM policies, network segmentation, security groups, vulnerability scanning, and automated compliance checks.
  • Lead migration initiatives from legacy infrastructure to cloud-native platforms, plan capacity, design networking, and execute lift-and-shift or re-platform strategies with minimal service disruption.
  • Create and maintain scalable networking architectures including VPC design, subnets, load balancers, NAT, VPN, peering, and DNS to support secure, performant application communication.
  • Automate repetitive operational tasks through scripting and tooling in Python, Go, Bash, or PowerShell to improve developer productivity and reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).
  • Collaborate with development teams to define platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or developer self-service patterns, including environment templating, feature flags, and deployment pipelines.
  • Manage secrets and credentials securely using vault solutions (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault) and integrate rotation and auditing into CI/CD workflows.
  • Plan and implement disaster recovery and backup strategies, run regular recovery drills, and maintain recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for business-critical services.
  • Optimize cloud costs using tagging policies, rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, and automated scale-down/up processes to align infrastructure spend with business priorities.
  • Perform capacity planning, performance tuning, and benchmarking for infrastructure components and cloud services to meet service levels and forecast demand.
  • Build and maintain immutable infrastructure and golden images (Packer, image pipelines) to reduce drift and simplify rollback strategies.
  • Provide technical leadership and mentor junior engineers on DevOps best practices, infrastructure design patterns, automation, and observability.
  • Integrate security and compliance into the software delivery lifecycle by implementing CI/CD checks, IaC scanning (terraform validate, tfsec), container image scanning, and policy-as-code (OPA, Sentinel).
  • Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to define SLIs, SLOs, and performance objectives; translate business requirements into operational runbooks and automation.
  • Drive platform improvements and feature development by evaluating new cloud services, open-source tools, and managed offerings to reduce operational burden and increase developer velocity.
  • Maintain and document architecture diagrams, runbooks, change logs, and onboarding guides to ensure operational knowledge is codified and accessible.
  • Execute blue/green and canary deployment strategies and automate progressive delivery tooling to reduce risk and accelerate safe rollouts of new features.
  • Manage vendor relationships for cloud providers, observability platforms, and third-party infrastructure services; evaluate SLAs and negotiate contracts that align with reliability targets.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc platform and infrastructure data requests, log analysis, and exploratory troubleshooting to surface root causes and mitigation steps.
  • Contribute to the organization's infrastructure roadmap and cloud adoption strategy with cost/benefit analyses and migration plans.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate product requirements into scalable infrastructure and deployment patterns.
  • Participate actively in sprint planning, architecture reviews, agile ceremonies, and technical design sessions within platform and engineering teams.
  • Assist in compliance audits and prepare documentation and evidence for internal and external security reviews.
  • Provide on-call support, lead incident response during outages, and coordinate post-incident remediation and follow-up actions.
  • Run POCs and trials for new tooling such as service meshes (Istio, Linkerd), serverless frameworks (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions), and edge/cloud-native storage solutions.
  • Support developer onboarding by creating templates, scripts, and documentation for local and cloud environments to reduce time to first commit.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong experience with cloud platforms: AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS, S3, VPC), Azure (AKS, Resource Manager), and/or Google Cloud Platform (GKE, Cloud Storage).
  • Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, including module composition and state management.
  • Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (kubeadm, Helm, Operators), and cluster lifecycle management.
  • CI/CD pipeline design and implementation using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or equivalent, including pipeline as code and artifact management.
  • Configuration management and automation skills with Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or similar tools.
  • Observability and monitoring expertise: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK stacks, metric collection and alerting strategies.
  • Strong scripting and programming skills: Python, Go, Bash, or PowerShell for automation, tooling, and CI/CD integrations.
  • Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, load balancing, DNS, routing, VPN, firewalls, and secure network design in cloud environments.
  • Security and compliance knowledge: IAM, key management, vulnerability scanning, container security, and policy as code (OPA, Sentinel).
  • Experience with logging, tracing, and distributed systems debugging: ELK, Fluentd/Fluent Bit, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry.
  • Familiarity with database operations and managed services: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Cloud SQL, and caching (Redis, Memcached).
  • Experience with configuration and secret management tools: HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault.
  • Knowledge of cost optimization techniques and cloud governance: tagging strategies, budget alerts, resource lifecycle policies.
  • Practical experience with service meshes (Istio, Linkerd) and ingress controllers for microservices networking.
  • CI/CD security and IaC scanning tools: tfsec, Checkov, Snyk, Clair, Trivy, or similar.

Soft Skills

  • Strong collaboration and influencing skills to work across engineering, security, and product teams and drive consensus on infrastructure decisions.
  • Excellent problem-solving and analytical thinking to diagnose complex production incidents and identify root causes under pressure.
  • Effective communication skills: able to explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders and document architecture and runbooks clearly.
  • Customer-focused mindset with a sense of ownership for production reliability and user experience.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning attitude to evaluate and adopt new cloud-native patterns, tools, and best practices.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance incident response, lifecycle work, and long-term platform initiatives.
  • Mentorship and leadership capabilities to coach junior engineers and promote DevOps/SRE culture across the organization.
  • Strong attention to detail and a security-first approach when designing and deploying infrastructure.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related technical field.
  • Certifications such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Google Professional DevOps Engineer, Azure DevOps Engineer, or HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Systems Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Network Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7+ years working in DevOps, Cloud Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering roles.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of progressive experience designing and operating production infrastructure and CI/CD systems for distributed applications.
  • Proven track record with cloud migrations, Kubernetes production deployments, automation of operational tasks, and incident management.
  • Experience working in agile engineering teams, collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders, and driving platform-level improvements.
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