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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Consultant

💰 $ - $

InfrastructureCloudDevOpsConsultingIT Architecture

🎯 Role Definition

The Infrastructure Consultant is a trusted technical advisor who designs, implements, and optimizes on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure solutions. This role blends architecture, hands-on engineering, security best practices, cost governance, and client-facing consulting to deliver scalable, resilient, and automated infrastructure platforms that support rapid application delivery and operational excellence.

Key focus areas: Infrastructure as Code (IaC), cloud-native architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP), Kubernetes and container platforms, CI/CD and automation, observability and incident response, networking and security, migration planning and execution, cost optimization, and stakeholder enablement.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Cloud/Infrastructure Engineer
  • Systems Administrator (Linux/Windows) with scripting experience
  • DevOps Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Advancement To:

  • Senior Infrastructure Consultant / Lead Infrastructure Architect
  • Cloud Architect / Principal Cloud Engineer
  • Head of Infrastructure / Director of Cloud Operations

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps/SRE Lead
  • Cloud Migration Specialist
  • Security Infrastructure Consultant

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the design and delivery of secure, scalable, resilient infrastructure architectures for clients or internal product teams, including IaaS, PaaS, containers, and hybrid deployments that meet business SLAs and compliance requirements.
  • Define and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards and modules using Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar tools to enable repeatable, auditable, and version-controlled infrastructure provisioning.
  • Architect, deploy, and operationalize Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE, or upstream K8s) and associated platform services (Ingress, service mesh, CRDs, and autoscaling) to support containerized workloads at scale.
  • Plan and execute cloud migration strategies and lift-and-shift, re-platform, or refactor projects, including workload discovery, dependency mapping, migration runbooks, cutover planning, validation, and rollback procedures.
  • Design and enforce cloud networking and security patterns, including VPC/VNet design, subnets, route tables, security groups, NSGs, peering, VPN/Direct Connect, and microsegmentation for multi-tier applications.
  • Implement and manage identity and access management (IAM) best practices, role-based access controls, least-privilege principles, and cross-account or subscription trust models for secure operations.
  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment workflows (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, etc.) with strong integration to IaC and release governance to accelerate safe delivery.
  • Lead platform hardening, baseline configuration, and OS-level security for Linux and Windows servers, including patch management, configuration management (Ansible/Chef/Puppet), and image lifecycle management.
  • Design and implement monitoring, logging, and observability solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic) to provide actionable telemetry, alerts, SLIs/SLOs, and post-incident analytics.
  • Provide infrastructure cost governance and optimization: tagging strategy, rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, workload placement, and continuous cost monitoring to reduce cloud spend while maintaining performance.
  • Develop disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plans, including RTO/RPO definitions, cross-region failover, data replication strategies, and periodic recovery testing.
  • Automate operational tasks such as backups, patching, scaling, and remediation via scripting (Python/Bash/PowerShell) and runbooks to reduce toil and improve reliability.
  • Conduct performance capacity planning, benchmarking, and tuning for compute, storage, and network resources to ensure application performance and predictable scaling behavior.
  • Lead incident response and root-cause analysis (RCA) for production infrastructure outages, coordinate cross-functional remediation, and drive long-term reliability improvements.
  • Collaborate with security, compliance, and risk teams to ensure infrastructure meets regulatory and audit requirements (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI-DSS, GDPR) and to remediate findings.
  • Create and maintain architecture diagrams, runbooks, operational runbooks, and design documents that communicate architecture decisions, trade-offs, and implementation details to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams, perform design reviews, conduct architecture workshops, and evangelize platform best practices and patterns.
  • Evaluate, select, and manage third-party infrastructure, PaaS, and vendor solutions (managed Kubernetes, DBaaS, CDN, monitoring vendors) and manage vendor relationships, PoCs, and procurement inputs.
  • Implement GitOps workflows and promote version-controlled infrastructure and application deployment models to improve traceability and rollback capabilities.
  • Integrate security scanning, compliance checks, and policy enforcement into the CI/CD and IaC pipelines (policy-as-code using Sentinel, OPA, or Cloud Custodian).
  • Design and manage hybrid or multi-cloud connectivity and patterns, including multi-cloud routing, identity federation, and consistent operational tooling across environments.
  • Conduct discovery, build business cases and TCO/ROI analyses for infrastructure modernization initiatives and present recommendations to executives and stakeholders.
  • Provide client-facing consultancy: run workshops, assess current-state infrastructure, produce gap analyses, roadmaps, and prioritized implementation plans that align with organizational goals.
  • Drive continual improvement initiatives: introduce automation frameworks, reduce manual interventions, standardize templates, and measure KPIs around deployment frequency, MTTR, and change failure rate.

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 training sessions and documentation to enable application teams to adopt platform services and IaC patterns.
  • Assist procurement and financial teams with vendor technical evaluations and cost projections.
  • Participate in pre-sales activities and technical scoping for infrastructure consulting engagements.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud platforms: deep hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — designing VPCs/VNets, identity, storage, and managed services.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, ARM templates, or Pulumi with experience building reusable modules and state management.
  • Container orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) and ecosystem tooling (Helm, Kustomize, Operators, Istio/Linkerd/service mesh concepts).
  • Configuration management and automation: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack, or equivalent.
  • CI/CD and GitOps tooling: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Flux — pipeline authoring and integration with IaC.
  • Scripting and programming: Python, Bash, and/or PowerShell for automation, tooling, and platform integrations.
  • Networking and security: TCP/IP, load balancing, VPNs, BGP, NAT, firewalls, TLS, encryption at rest/in transit, WAFs, and DDoS mitigation.
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Splunk, Datadog, New Relic — alerting, dashboards, and log analysis.
  • Operating systems: Advanced Linux (RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu) and Windows Server administration and troubleshooting.
  • Database and storage: experience with managed databases (RDS, Cloud SQL), object storage (S3/GCS/Azure Blob), and block storage design/performance considerations.
  • Security & compliance tooling: IAM design, secrets management (Vault, Secrets Manager), vulnerability scanning, and policy-as-code (OPA, Sentinel).
  • CI/CD security & pipelines integration: SCA/DAST tools and automated security gates.
  • Cost management: tagging strategies, billing analysis, cost optimization tools and practices.
  • Disaster recovery & backup technologies and planning.
  • Monitoring and incident response automation: PagerDuty, Opsgenie, runbook automation.

Soft Skills

  • Strong client-facing communication: translate technical trade-offs into business impact and present recommendations to executives.
  • Consulting mindset: ability to scoping, estimate effort, prioritize roadmap items, and balance short-term wins vs long-term architecture.
  • Collaboration and influence: work cross-functionally with developers, security, product, and operations to align goals and deliver outcomes.
  • Problem solving and analytical thinking: diagnose complex system issues, synthesize root causes, and propose lasting remediation.
  • Mentorship and coaching: enable engineering teams to adopt platform practices and raise overall capability.
  • Time management and prioritization in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
  • Documentation and knowledge transfer: produce clear architecture docs, runbooks, and onboarding materials.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: keep up-to-date with cloud innovations, open-source tools, and industry best practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, or a closely related technical discipline OR equivalent demonstrable experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, IT Management, or MBA with technical concentration.
  • Professional certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Cloud Engineering
  • Computer Networks
  • Software Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of professional experience in infrastructure, cloud architecture, DevOps, or SRE roles.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of direct experience designing and implementing cloud or hybrid infrastructure solutions for enterprise customers or in a consultancy/managed services context.
  • Demonstrated track record of successful cloud migrations, IaC adoption, Kubernetes platform builds, and delivering measurable cost and reliability improvements.
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