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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Analyst

💰 $70,000 - $110,000

InfrastructureITCloudOperations

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an Infrastructure Analyst who will design, operate and optimize resilient on‑premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure. This role focuses on systems and network administration, automation (Infrastructure as Code), monitoring, incident response, capacity planning, backup and recovery, security hardening, and cross-team collaboration. The ideal candidate will combine hands‑on technical expertise (Linux/Windows, virtualization, AWS/Azure/GCP, networking, storage) with strong troubleshooting, documentation, and stakeholder communication skills.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator (Windows/Linux)
  • Network Engineer or Network Administrator
  • Junior Infrastructure/Operations Analyst

Advancement To:

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

Lateral Moves:

  • Security Analyst (Infrastructure Security)
  • DevOps Engineer
  • Storage & Backup Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement and maintain highly available Windows and Linux server environments including installation, configuration, patching, performance tuning, and lifecycle management across on‑premises and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • Build, manage and optimize virtualized infrastructure using VMware ESXi, vCenter, Hyper‑V or similar hypervisor platforms, ensuring capacity planning, resource allocation, and host maintenance windows are executed with minimal downtime.
  • Implement and manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, ARM templates, or CloudFormation to provision and version cloud and hybrid infrastructure reliably and repeatably.
  • Automate routine operational tasks and configuration management using Ansible, Puppet, Chef, PowerShell, Bash scripts, or equivalent tools to reduce manual effort and configuration drift.
  • Administer and maintain networking services including TCP/IP, VLANs, routing/switching fundamentals, firewalls, load balancers, DNS, DHCP, and VPNs to ensure secure and performant connectivity for applications and users.
  • Monitor infrastructure health and performance using Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Datadog, Zabbix, SolarWinds, or ELK stack; create dashboards, alerts, and runbooks to drive proactive incident detection and resolution.
  • Lead incident response for infrastructure outages, perform root cause analysis, coordinate cross‑functional troubleshooting, and produce post‑incident reports with mitigation and remediation plans.
  • Manage backup, snapshotting and disaster recovery processes using Veeam, NetBackup, Rubrik or cloud-native backup solutions; design and test recovery plans to meet RTO/RPO objectives.
  • Implement identity and access management best practices, manage service accounts, RBAC, Active Directory/LDAP integrations, and cloud IAM policies to enforce least privilege.
  • Harden servers, network devices and cloud resources according to CIS benchmarks and organizational security standards; apply patching strategies and vulnerability remediation workflows in collaboration with security teams.
  • Participate in cloud cost optimization initiatives by rightsizing instances, leveraging reserved/spot instances, and implementing tagging and budget monitoring to control spend across AWS/Azure/GCP.
  • Support containerized workloads and platforms (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS/AKS/GKE) by collaborating with DevOps teams on platform capacity, node lifecycle, storage, and networking integration.
  • Configure and manage storage solutions (SAN, NAS, iSCSI) and file services, oversee provisioning, tiering, and performance tuning for database and application workloads.
  • Maintain comprehensive infrastructure documentation including topology diagrams, runbooks, change history, configuration baselines, and standard operating procedures to ensure knowledge continuity and compliance.
  • Execute change management and release processes, prepare change windows, risk assessments, and roll-back plans while coordinating stakeholders and ensuring adherence to ITIL/organizational change controls.
  • Conduct capacity planning and trend analysis for compute, storage, and network resources; forecast growth and build procurement/scale plans to meet business demand.
  • Integrate infrastructure with CI/CD pipelines and provisioning workflows to enable faster, safer deployments and environment reproducibility for development and production systems.
  • Manage vendor relationships and escalations for hardware, cloud, network, and managed services; evaluate new technologies, RFP responses, and support contracts to achieve operational SLAs.
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory and corporate governance frameworks (PCI, HIPAA, SOC, ISO) by implementing logging, auditing, encryption, and access controls across infrastructure layers.
  • Provide Level 2/3 technical support for infrastructure-related tickets, mentor junior engineers, and deliver training to operations and application teams on infrastructure usage and best practices.
  • Design and implement monitoring and alerting improvements, SLAs and SLOs for critical business services; refine alert thresholds and incident escalation policies to reduce noise and MTTR.
  • Perform regular infrastructure health checks, patch management cycles, and firmware updates for servers, storage arrays, switches and firewalls while coordinating maintenance with application owners.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist in proof-of-concept evaluations for new infrastructure, cloud services, or monitoring tools and produce technical recommendation reports.
  • Support onboarding/offboarding processes for infrastructure access and provisioning for new hires and contractors.
  • Maintain asset inventory, lifecycle tracking and licensing compliance for hardware, software and cloud resources.
  • Help build and refine infrastructure cost reporting and internal chargeback/showback models.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Operating Systems: Advanced administration of Linux distributions (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu) and Windows Server (2016/2019/2022) — installation, hardening, troubleshooting, and patching.
  • Cloud Platforms: Practical experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP — provisioning, VPC/Networking, IAM, storage, and native monitoring; cloud migration experience a plus.
  • Virtualization: Hands‑on with VMware vSphere/vCenter, ESXi, and Hyper‑V; cluster management, DRS, HA and datastore management.
  • Infrastructure as Code & Automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and scripting (PowerShell, Bash, Python) for automation and repeatability.
  • Networking: Solid knowledge of TCP/IP, routing, switching, DNS, DHCP, load balancing (F5, NGINX, cloud LB), VPNs, and firewall policies.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Familiar with Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK stack, Nagios, or SolarWinds for alerting, dashboards and capacity metrics.
  • Backup & Disaster Recovery: Experience with Veeam, Veritas NetBackup, Rubrik, or cloud snapshot/backup solutions and tested DR plan execution.
  • Containers & Orchestration: Understanding of Docker and Kubernetes fundamentals, cluster administration basics, and container networking/storage concepts.
  • Storage & Filesystems: Knowledge of SAN/NAS, iSCSI, NFS, SMB, RAID configurations and storage performance tuning.
  • Security & Compliance: Experience with hardening, vulnerability management, encryption, patch management, audits and common frameworks (CIS, PCI, HIPAA, SOC).
  • CI/CD Integration: Familiarity integrating infrastructure provisioning and configuration with Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, or similar pipelines.
  • Monitoring of cost and optimization: Tagging, budgeting and cost analysis tools for cloud spend optimization.
  • ITIL & Change Management: Knowledge of incident, problem and change management processes and SLA-driven operations.
  • Database Support Basics: Understanding of how infrastructure affects databases (backup, I/O, latency) and collaboration experience with DBAs.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking to triage complex incidents and identify root causes quickly.
  • Clear, concise communication tailored to technical and non-technical stakeholders, including status updates during incidents.
  • Collaborative team player who partners effectively with developers, security, network, and application teams.
  • Prioritization and time management to handle competing operational tasks, projects, and on-call responsibilities.
  • Detail-oriented documentation habits to maintain runbooks, SOPs and configuration records for auditability and knowledge transfer.
  • Customer-service mindset with a bias for action and continuous improvement.
  • Ability to mentor junior staff, delegate tasks, and lead small cross-functional technical initiatives.
  • Adaptability to changing business needs and fast-evolving cloud and infrastructure technologies.
  • Strong organizational skills for managing tickets, change windows, and asset lifecycles.
  • Decision-making under pressure during outages and incident escalations.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline
  • OR equivalent technical experience and demonstrated hands-on infrastructure work

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a related field
  • Relevant certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate), Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator, RHCE, VMware VCP, CompTIA Network+/Security+, CCNA, or ITIL Foundation

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Information Systems
  • Network Engineering
  • Electrical or Computer Engineering
  • Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–7 years of progressive experience in IT infrastructure, systems administration, cloud operations or a related role.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years supporting hybrid cloud and on-premises infrastructure, with demonstrable experience in automation (Terraform/Ansible), virtualization (VMware), and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP).
  • Proven track record of incident management, DR testing, capacity planning, and cross-functional project delivery.
  • Experience working in regulated environments or with compliance standards (PCI, HIPAA, SOC) and enterprise change management processes.
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