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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Designer

💰 $90,000 - $160,000

EngineeringInfrastructureCloudArchitecture

🎯 Role Definition

The Infrastructure Designer is a technical design and architecture role focused on planning, specifying, and validating resilient, scalable, secure infrastructure solutions across on-premises and cloud environments. This role partners with cloud engineers, network architects, application owners, and security teams to produce detailed infrastructure blueprints, technical specifications, and implementation-ready designs using modern infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tooling. The ideal candidate brings hands-on architecture experience with public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), network design, compute, storage, and automation, and a strong focus on performance, cost optimization, and security-by-design.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Cloud Engineer
  • Network Engineer / Network Architect
  • Systems Engineer / Systems Administrator

Advancement To:

  • Senior Infrastructure Architect
  • Principal Cloud Architect
  • Director of Infrastructure / VP of Cloud Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / Platform Engineering Lead
  • Security Architect
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the design and specification of end-to-end infrastructure solutions, producing architecture diagrams, component-level design documents, and implementation runbooks that translate business requirements into operational infrastructure.
  • Develop and validate scalable cloud architecture patterns (multi-AZ, multi-region, hybrid cloud) that ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery for critical applications.
  • Create detailed network architecture designs including subnet architecture, routing, VPN/Direct Connect links, firewall rules, load balancer topology, DNS design, and traffic segmentation for performance and security.
  • Define compute and storage sizing, capacity planning models, and resource allocation strategies to meet performance, latency, and throughput SLAs while optimizing cost.
  • Produce Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) modules and templates (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates) standards and blueprints that enforce repeatable, auditable, and version-controlled infrastructure provisioning.
  • Specify CI/CD pipelines and automation workflows for provisioning, configuration management, and release orchestration to accelerate delivery and reduce human error.
  • Establish security-by-design requirements including identity and access management (IAM) policies, network security groups, encryption standards, secrets management, and compliance guardrails.
  • Design monitoring and observability architectures (metrics, logs, tracing) with recommended tools, alerting thresholds, and runbooks to support SRE and on-call operations.
  • Lead PoCs and prototype evaluations for new infrastructure technologies, vendors, and cloud services to drive adoption of efficient patterns and identify potential risks.
  • Collaborate with application architects and development teams to co-design infrastructure that supports scalability (auto-scaling strategies), maintainability, and microservice architectures.
  • Define backup, retention, and recovery strategies aligned with business RPO/RTOs, and design data lifecycle and archival solutions across cloud and on-premises storage tiers.
  • Create cost-optimization strategies and right-sizing recommendations, including reserved instances, savings plans, and resource tagging/chargeback models to manage cloud spend.
  • Validate designs through performance modelling, load testing plans, and capacity projections to ensure that infrastructure meets expected demand peaks and growth forecasts.
  • Author standardized architecture decision records (ADR), runbooks, and handover documentation to support cross-functional teams during implementation and operations.
  • Conduct security and regulatory impact assessments (PCI, HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR) of proposed infrastructure designs and produce mitigation plans as required.
  • Mentor and review the work of engineers and junior architects to ensure adherence to design standards, patterns, and company architecture principles.
  • Define and maintain infrastructure design patterns, reference architectures, and reusable component libraries to accelerate delivery and reduce technical debt.
  • Coordinate with procurement and vendor management teams during design and selection phases for third-party infrastructure, cloud services, or managed offering evaluations.
  • Drive infrastructure change advisory board (CAB) discussions for architecture changes, decommissioning, and major deployments to align stakeholders and minimize risk.
  • Ensure observance of operational readiness criteria by validating runbooks, deployment checklists, and rollback procedures before production cutovers.
  • Create and maintain security threat models, network segmentation diagrams, and attack surface analyses for complex multi-tenant or hybrid environments.
  • Standardize environment provisioning across dev/test/staging/production to ensure parity, reduce environment-specific issues, and streamline releases.
  • Participate in sprint planning, backlog grooming, and cross-team planning to prioritize infrastructure design work aligned to business initiatives and product roadmaps.

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 technical guidance during vendor onboarding and contract review for cloud and infrastructure services.
  • Assist in incident postmortems by providing architecture context, root cause analysis, and recommendations to prevent recurrence.
  • Prepare architecture reviews, presentation decks, and technical briefings for executive stakeholders and cross-functional teams.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP): design patterns, regional services, networking, identity, and managed services.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates): module design, state management, and best practices.
  • Network Design and Protocols: VPC/VNet design, routing, BGP, VPN, Direct Connect/ExpressRoute, load balancing, DNS and CDN integration.
  • Compute & Storage Architecture: container orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS/AKS/GKE), VM sizing, block/object storage, and backup strategies.
  • CI/CD and Automation: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker, Ansible, or equivalent deployment automation tools.
  • Security & Compliance: IAM, least privilege, encryption (in transit & at rest), secrets management (HashiCorp Vault), penetration testing concepts.
  • Observability & Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK stack, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry).
  • Performance Engineering: capacity planning, load testing, benchmarking tools (JMeter, k6), and tuning for latency-sensitive systems.
  • Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes design patterns, service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) fundamentals.
  • Cost Optimization & FinOps practices: tagging strategies, rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, billing analysis.
  • Scripting & Programming: Python, Go, Bash/PowerShell for automation, tooling, and integration tasks.
  • Architecture Documentation: UML/Diagrams, C4 model, ADRs, and creating implementation-ready technical specifications.
  • Identity & Access Management: SSO, SAML/OAuth2, role-based access controls, and federation patterns.
  • Hybrid Cloud & On-Prem Integration: virtualization platforms (VMware), storage arrays, SAN/NAS, and migration strategies.

Soft Skills

  • Clear and persuasive technical writing and documentation skills tailored to engineering and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Strong stakeholder management with the ability to lead cross-functional design reviews and negotiate trade-offs.
  • Analytical problem solving and structured decision-making with the ability to justify architecture choices.
  • Proactive mentorship and team collaboration skills to uplift engineering practices and share design patterns.
  • Effective time management and prioritization in a fast-paced, iterative delivery environment.
  • Ability to facilitate workshops, whiteboarding sessions, and architecture sprint activities.
  • Customer-centric mindset to translate business requirements into practical infrastructure outcomes.
  • Resilience and adaptability in response to production incidents or changing technical constraints.
  • Attention to detail balanced with pragmatic delivery-minded instincts.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or IT Architecture, or relevant advanced certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Network Engineering
  • Systems Engineering
  • Cloud/Distributed Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12 years of combined infrastructure, cloud, networking, and systems design experience.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years designing and delivering production infrastructure solutions, including significant cloud design responsibility.
  • Proven track record of architecting secure, high-availability systems at scale with demonstrable cost optimization and operational readiness outcomes.
  • Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Professional), Azure Solutions Architect, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, or HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate are highly desirable.
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