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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Administrator

💰 $70,000 - $110,000

ITInfrastructureOperationsSystems Administration

🎯 Role Definition

The Infrastructure Administrator is responsible for the reliable design, deployment, configuration, and day-to-day operations of the organization’s core infrastructure — including servers (Windows and Linux), virtualization, storage, network services, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and backup/recovery systems. This role ensures high availability, performance, security and compliance of production and non-production environments, drives infrastructure automation and monitoring, and partners with application, security, and network teams to support business continuity and rapid incident response.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Systems Administrator / Systems Support Engineer
  • Network Technician / Network Administrator
  • IT Support Specialist / Help Desk Technician

Advancement To:

  • Senior Infrastructure Administrator / Lead Systems Administrator
  • Cloud Engineer / Cloud Infrastructure Architect
  • IT Operations Manager / Infrastructure Manager
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Security Analyst / Security Engineer
  • Storage/Backup Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, deploy, and maintain enterprise Windows and Linux server environments, including hardening, patch management, performance tuning, and lifecycle management to ensure stable and secure production and development platforms.
  • Architect, implement, and operate virtualized environments using VMware vSphere, Hyper-V or similar platforms; manage host clusters, vMotion, DRS, and capacity planning to support scalability and high availability.
  • Administer Active Directory, LDAP, Group Policy, DNS and DHCP services for domain management, authentication, name resolution, and secure access across multi-site deployments.
  • Plan and execute migrations to public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), manage IaaS resources, hybrid connectivity (VPN/ExpressRoute/Direct Connect), and optimize cloud spend while adhering to security and compliance policies.
  • Implement infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, Azure Resource Manager, CloudFormation or similar tools to provision, version and maintain infrastructure reproducibly and securely.
  • Build and maintain configuration management and automation pipelines with Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or PowerShell DSC to reduce manual work, enforce configuration drift prevention and enable rapid environment provisioning.
  • Develop and maintain robust backup and disaster recovery strategies using Veeam, NetBackup, Commvault or native cloud backup solutions; conduct regular restores and DR exercises to validate recovery objectives (RPO/RTO).
  • Monitor infrastructure health and performance using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Zabbix, Datadog or Splunk; create alerting, runbooks, and dashboards to proactively identify and remediate system issues.
  • Implement and manage enterprise storage systems (SAN/NAS), file services, snapshotting, replication and capacity planning to ensure data integrity and performance for databases and applications.
  • Administer network services and collaborate with network engineering to troubleshoot L2/L3 issues, implement routing, VLANs, firewall rules, load balancers and ensure secure, low-latency connectivity between services.
  • Harden and maintain endpoint and server security controls (firewalls, IPS/IDS, host-based security, patch management, vulnerability remediation) and coordinate with security teams to remediate findings.
  • Manage and operate container platforms (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS/AKS/GKE) including cluster provisioning, security context, ingress, service discovery, and persistent storage integration.
  • Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, system architecture diagrams, and standard operating procedures to support operational excellence and knowledge transfer.
  • Lead incident response and post-mortem analysis for infrastructure outages, orchestrate cross-functional remediation, identify root causes, and implement permanent corrective actions to prevent recurrence.
  • Perform capacity planning, forecasting and resource optimization for compute, storage and network resources; present cost/benefit analyses to stakeholders to drive infrastructure investment decisions.
  • Support CI/CD pipelines by integrating infrastructure provisioning and environment configuration into deployment workflows, working closely with development and DevOps teams to enable rapid, reproducible releases.
  • Implement privileged access management, secrets management and identity controls (e.g., Azure AD, IAM roles, HashiCorp Vault) to secure credentials, service accounts and API keys across environments.
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory and organizational standards (HIPAA, PCI, SOC2, GDPR as applicable) by implementing controls, providing evidence for audits and remediating compliance gaps.
  • Manage vendor relationships and 3rd-party infrastructure contracts, evaluate new technologies, perform proof-of-concepts and recommend improvements to reduce operational risk and improve time-to-value.
  • Provide on-call support and incident escalation coverage to meet defined SLAs; triage, remediate production incidents and communicate status updates to leadership and stakeholders with clarity and timeliness.
  • Implement proactive system upgrades, firmware updates, and end-of-life planning across hardware and software stacks while minimizing service disruption and coordinating maintenance windows.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives to automate routine tasks, improve deployment speed, and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) using scripting (PowerShell, Bash, Python) and automation frameworks.
  • Configure and maintain logging, centralized syslog, and audit pipelines to support troubleshooting, security investigations and operational analytics.
  • Manage and enforce network segmentation, micro-segmentation where applicable, and secure connectivity patterns to reduce attack surface and comply with least-privilege principles.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis to help teams understand infrastructure usage patterns and inform capacity planning.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap by advising on storage architectures, backup retention, and data lifecycle management.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements, ensuring availability and performance of analytics and reporting platforms.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team, providing infrastructure estimates and operational input.
  • Mentor junior administrators and engineers, contribute to hiring interviews, and help build a high-performing infrastructure team through knowledge sharing and training.
  • Evaluate and document third-party SaaS and managed service options to offload operational burden where it aligns with security and compliance requirements.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Windows Server administration (2012/2016/2019/2022), Active Directory, Group Policy management and Windows patching strategies.
  • Linux systems administration (RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu), package management, kernel tuning, systemd and troubleshooting Linux performance.
  • Cloud platforms: AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS), Microsoft Azure (VMs, VNets, Azure AD) or Google Cloud Platform fundamentals and cloud networking.
  • Virtualization technologies: VMware vSphere/vCenter, ESXi, vSAN, Hyper-V, and experience with host clustering, HA and DR solutions.
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM templates, CloudFormation) for reproducible, version-controlled infrastructure deployments.
  • Configuration management and automation: Ansible, Puppet, Chef, PowerShell, Bash scripting and automation of repetitive tasks.
  • Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, routing, switching, VLANs, VPN, firewalls, load balancers and troubleshooting using tools like tcpdump and Wireshark.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), Helm, and CI/CD integration for container-based workloads.
  • Monitoring, observability and logging: Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Zabbix, Datadog, ELK stack or Splunk for metrics, alerts and incident detection.
  • Backup and disaster recovery tools: Veeam, NetBackup, Commvault, snapshots, replication and documented recovery procedures.
  • Security and compliance controls: firewalls, IDS/IPS, vulnerability scanning (Nessus, Qualys), patch management and secure configuration standards.
  • Storage systems: SAN/NAS management, iSCSI, NFS, SMB/CIFS, performance tuning and capacity planning.
  • Scripting and automation: strong proficiency in PowerShell, Bash, and familiarity with Python for automation and tooling development.
  • Identity and access management: Azure AD, IAM roles, SAML/OAuth, single sign-on (SSO) and privileged access management solutions.
  • Experience with cost optimization and resource tagging in cloud environments for governance and chargeback models.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent problem-solving and analytical thinking with a focus on root-cause analysis and long-term fixes.
  • Clear verbal and written communication skills for technical and non-technical audiences, including status reports and runbooks.
  • Strong collaboration and interpersonal skills to work cross-functionally with development, security, network and business teams.
  • Time management and prioritization under pressure, able to manage multiple incidents and projects simultaneously.
  • Customer-focused mindset, responsive to internal stakeholders and able to manage expectations and SLAs.
  • Continuous learning orientation and curiosity to evaluate new tools, automation techniques and best practices.
  • Attention to detail, documentation discipline and a methodical approach to change management.
  • Leadership and mentorship capabilities to grow junior staff and drive team improvements.
  • Adaptability and resilience in fast-changing cloud and hybrid infrastructure environments.
  • Project management basics to scope, plan and execute infrastructure upgrades and migrations.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Network Engineering, or related field OR equivalent practical experience in systems and infrastructure administration.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, or Engineering.
  • Relevant industry certifications such as: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate, RHCE, VMware VCP, CompTIA Network+/Security+, CCNA.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Systems
  • Network Engineering
  • Cybersecurity
  • Software Engineering / DevOps

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3 - 7 years of hands-on infrastructure administration experience working with servers, virtualization, networking and cloud platforms.

Preferred: 5+ years of progressive experience administering hybrid cloud and on-prem infrastructure, leading migrations or modernization projects, proven experience with automation (Terraform/Ansible), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and demonstrated ability to own incident response and operational reliability at scale.

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