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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Automation Engineer

💰 $ - $

🎯 Role Definition

The Infrastructure Automation Engineer designs, builds, and maintains scalable, secure, and repeatable infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automated pipelines. This role partners with DevOps, SRE, security, and application teams to automate provisioning, configuration, deployment, and monitoring across public cloud and hybrid environments. Candidates should demonstrate strong cloud-native automation experience (Terraform/CloudFormation), configuration management (Ansible/Puppet/Chef), container orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD automation, observability, and scripting (Python/Bash) to deliver resilient platform services.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • DevOps Engineer with emphasis on automation and IaC
  • Systems / Platform Engineer experienced in cloud infrastructure
  • Cloud Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Advancement To:

  • Senior Infrastructure Automation Engineer / Lead Automation Engineer
  • Platform Engineering Manager or Principal Cloud Architect
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead or Head of Platform

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
  • Security Automation Engineer
  • CI/CD / Platform Reliability Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules and templates using Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or equivalent to provision cloud resources in a repeatable, version-controlled manner across environments.
  • Develop, maintain, and improve configuration management automation using Ansible, Puppet, or Chef to enforce desired state and reduce manual configuration drift on servers and containers.
  • Author and operate CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD) that automate build, test, and deployment for infrastructure changes as well as application releases, including automated rollback strategies.
  • Build and maintain GitOps workflows and repository structures to enable declarative continuous delivery of cluster and infrastructure resources.
  • Design and operate Kubernetes platform automation including cluster provisioning (EKS/AKS/GKE or self-managed), lifecycle management, Helm chart development, and operator usage for scalable containerized workloads.
  • Automate multi-cloud resource provisioning, identity and access management (IAM) configuration, networking, and storage orchestration to support hybrid cloud deployments and migration efforts.
  • Implement infrastructure testing strategies including unit tests for IaC modules, integration tests, and end-to-end validation pipelines to ensure safe automated changes to production infrastructure.
  • Collaborate with security and compliance teams to automate security controls, encryption key lifecycle (HashiCorp Vault), secrets management, vulnerability scanning, and drift detection into the CI/CD process.
  • Create, iterate, and enforce infrastructure policies and guardrails using policy-as-code tools (Open Policy Agent, Terraform Sentinel) to prevent misconfigurations and enforce compliance.
  • Develop and maintain observability and monitoring automation including Prometheus exporters, Grafana dashboards, alerting rules, and automated incident routes to SRE/ops teams.
  • Build automated backup, disaster recovery and infrastructure remediation playbooks that can be executed automatically or triggered by monitoring/alert systems.
  • Optimize and automate cloud costs by automating rightsizing, autoscaling policies, resource tagging, and scheduled resource lifecycle actions to meet budget and performance targets.
  • Integrate infrastructure automation with ticketing systems, chatops and runbook automation (PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Slack bots) to streamline operational workflows and on-call response.
  • Troubleshoot, debug and provide root cause analysis for automated provisioning failures, pipeline errors, cluster issues, and deployment regressions; implement preventive automation to reduce recurrence.
  • Mentor and coach engineers on IaC best practices, reusable module patterns, semantic versioning of modules, and CI/CD pipeline hygiene to elevate team automation maturity.
  • Drive platform engineering initiatives to standardize build pipelines, reusable runtime components, and self-service infrastructure capabilities for product teams.
  • Maintain and evolve automated image build pipelines (Packer) and golden images for consistent OS/container runtime baselines and security patching automation.
  • Implement network automation and infrastructure-as-network policies (VPC, peering, load balancers, firewalls) using IaC and automation frameworks to support secure, high-performance connectivity.
  • Participate in capacity planning, infrastructure performance tuning and automation of scaling strategies for databases, caches, and compute clusters.
  • Lead or contribute to cross-functional projects to automate on-call runbooks, blue/green or canary deployment strategies, and traffic management across services.
  • Evaluate, prototype and adopt new automation tools, frameworks and cloud features; measure ROI and operational impact before scaling to production.
  • Maintain high-quality technical documentation for automated modules, pipeline templates, runbooks, and platform services to enable self-service and knowledge transfer.
  • Ensure robust change control by integrating automated approvals, plan/apply gating, and automated drift detection into the deployment lifecycle.
  • Collaborate with application and product teams to translate business requirements into automated, resilient infrastructure solutions that reduce lead time for feature delivery.

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.
  • Provide on-call rotation support for critical automation pipelines and platform services, including weekends and emergency response as needed.
  • Participate in post-incident reviews and implement automation-driven remediation identified during retrospectives.
  • Help evaluate vendor-managed services and third-party automation tools to determine fit for standardized platform adoption.
  • Assist in onboarding new teams to platform capabilities and automate scaffolded project templates and CI/CD starter kits.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform (preferred), AWS CloudFormation, Pulumi — advanced module design and state management.
  • Configuration Management: Ansible, Puppet, or Chef for automated server and application configuration.
  • Container Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) operations, Helm charts, Operators, and cluster lifecycle automation.
  • Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, or GCP — VPC/networking, IAM, compute, storage and managed services automation.
  • CI/CD and GitOps: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD — pipeline authoring, pipeline-as-code, and release automation.
  • Scripting & Programming: Python, Go, Bash for automation scripts, custom tooling and integration tasks.
  • Secrets and Key Management: HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS, or native cloud secrets managers and automated secret rotation.
  • Observability & Monitoring Automation: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog — automated alerts, dashboards, and instrumentation.
  • Security Automation & Compliance: policy-as-code (OPA), container image scanning, vulnerability scanning and automated remediation workflows.
  • Version Control & Collaboration: Git, branching/tagging strategies, code reviews, and pull request automation.
  • Automated Testing for Infra: Terratest, kitchen-terraform, pytest, and integration testing frameworks for validating infrastructure changes.
  • Image Build Automation: Packer, container image pipelines and automated patching processes.
  • Networking & Load Balancing Automation: automating VPCs, subnets, firewall rules, ingress controllers and cloud load balancers.

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication for clear runbooks, documentation, and cross-team coordination.
  • Problem-solving mindset with a focus on root cause analysis and automation-first remediation.
  • Collaboration and stakeholder management across engineering, security, and product teams.
  • Mentorship and knowledge sharing to elevate team automation capabilities and IaC hygiene.
  • Prioritization and time management in a fast-paced, agile environment with competing demands.
  • Customer-focused approach to enable developer self-service and reduce platform friction.
  • Continuous learning orientation to stay current with cloud-native and automation best practices.
  • Attention to detail and a quality-first approach to infrastructure change and testing.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, or related technical field and/or relevant professional certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate, Certified Kubernetes Administrator).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3 - 7 years in infrastructure, platform, or DevOps roles with demonstrable automation and cloud experience.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of hands-on experience automating cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Proven track record delivering IaC at scale, operating Kubernetes in production, and driving platform-level automation initiatives.
  • Experience in regulated industries or with strict compliance requirements is a plus.
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