Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Developer

🎯 Role Definition

As an Infrastructure Developer, you will architect, implement, and manage the foundational systems and platforms that enable development and operations teams to deliver applications efficiently. You will lead automation efforts, ensure infrastructure reliability and security, optimize performance, and implement monitoring and observability frameworks. This role requires collaboration with software engineers, DevOps, security teams, and business stakeholders to maintain robust, scalable, and highly available infrastructure. You will also mentor junior engineers, drive best practices, and contribute to the organization’s infrastructure strategy and roadmap.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

DevOps Engineer with strong automation experience
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer or Platform Engineer
Software Engineer interested in infrastructure and automation work

Advancement To:

Lead Infrastructure Developer / Platform Lead
Infrastructure Architect / Cloud Architect
Head of Platform Engineering / Director of DevOps & Infrastructure

Lateral Moves:

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Platform Engineering Manager
Cloud Native Infrastructure Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Architect and develop infrastructure‑as‑code solutions to deploy highly scalable cloud or hybrid platform infrastructure.
Design and implement CI/CD pipelines, automated build and release processes, and deployment workflows to streamline integration and delivery.
Work closely with software engineering and operations teams to integrate underlying infrastructure with applications, ensuring smooth end‑to‑end delivery from code commit to production.
Develop automation scripts or frameworks (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet) to provision, configure and manage infrastructure components.
Monitor, troubleshoot and optimize infrastructure performance, availability, latency and capacity; propose improvements and preventive actions.
Manage containerization and orchestration environments (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), integrating them into the infrastructure fabric and ensuring best practices are followed.
Lead cloud platform strategy—public (AWS, Azure, GCP) or private—and the migration of legacy systems into cloud‑native, resilient environments.
Ensure security, compliance, identity and access controls, encryption, and data protection are built into the infrastructure from the ground up.
Maintain infrastructure documentation, architecture diagrams, operational run‑books, and support knowledge transfer across teams.
Collaborate in agile teams with product, development, QA, security and operations to deliver infrastructure features aligned to business priorities.
Lead the evaluation, selection and adoption of new infrastructure tools, frameworks and technologies, and drive continuous improvement across the infrastructure domain.
Perform capacity planning and availability management; advise on resource allocation, scaling strategies, disaster recovery and business continuity.
Participate in incident review, root‑cause analysis, major incident management and post‑mortem action planning to reduce recurrence and improve reliability.
Mentor and coach junior infrastructure developers or engineers, conduct peer code reviews and contribute to raising team standards.
Develop infrastructure monitoring, observability and logging systems (e.g., Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana) to deliver actionable insights and alerting.
Automate onboarding, configuration and provisioning of environments, reducing manual effort and time to productivity for application teams.
Drive cost optimisation and efficient usage of infrastructure resources (virtual machines, containers, storage, networking) while supporting growth and scaling.
Engage in cross‑company solution development, standardise infrastructure tooling, share best practices, and contribute reusable assets (libraries, scripts, patterns).
Lead or support infrastructure migration, upgrade or transformation projects (e.g., on‑prem to cloud, monolith to microservices supporting infra) with minimal downtime.
Own the lifecycle of infrastructure components, including build, integration, system testing, release, production hand‑over and operational support.
Provide technical leadership in defining infrastructure standards, configuration management, version control of infrastructure artifacts and change‑management processes.

Secondary Functions

Support ad‑hoc infrastructure metrics requests and exploratory performance/logging analysis.
Contribute to the organisation’s infrastructure strategy and roadmap, assisting with vendor evaluation, tooling and process optimisation.
Collaborate with business units to translate infrastructure needs into engineering requirements (platform as a product mindset).
Participate in sprint planning, agile ceremonies and backlog grooming within the infrastructure engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Strong programming/scripting experience (Python, Bash, PowerShell or similar) to automate infrastructure workflows.
Expertise in infrastructure‑as‑code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Chef or Puppet.
Proven experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud) and working knowledge of hybrid or multi‑cloud environments.
Containerisation and orchestration experience (Docker, Kubernetes, mesosphere, etc) in production‑scale deployment.
Strong knowledge of CI/CD build and release tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) and automated pipeline design.
Deep understanding of system performance, monitoring, observability, logging and alerting frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk).
Solid networking, operating system (Linux/UNIX/Windows) and virtualisation fundamentals (VMware, Hyper‑V, cloud VMs).
Experience in security, identity & access management, encryption, secure architecture and compliance within infrastructure.
Version control, artifact repository, build automation, testing frameworks — familiarity with engineering best practices applied to infrastructure code.
Excellent documentation skills including infrastructure architecture diagrams, runbooks, operational hand‑over documentation and technical guides.

Soft Skills

Strong problem‑solving and analytical mindset: able to dive into root causes, perform data‑driven analysis, and propose architectural improvements.
Excellent communication skills: comfortable collaborating with developers, QA, product, operations and senior business stakeholders.
Leadership and mentoring ability: willing to coach peers, share knowledge, set standards and influence team behavior positively.
Adaptability and continuous learning orientation: keep up‑to‑date with infrastructure, cloud and DevOps trends and encourage innovation.
Ownership and accountability: take responsibility for end‑to‑end delivery of infrastructure solutions, from conception through operations.
Strategic thinking: align infrastructure work with business goals, cost‑efficiency, scalability and operational resilience.
Time‑management and priority setting: manage multiple initiatives, handle urgent operations issues and deliver planned enhancements.
Collaborative mindset: work across cross‑functional teams, facilitate consensus, and drive shared infrastructure goals.
Attention to detail: ensure infrastructure code, documentation, and standards are correct, consistent, maintainable and testable.
Resilience under pressure: support production systems, handle incidents and contribute to continuous improvement even under tight deadlines.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering or related technical discipline.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, DevOps or related field, or equivalent proven infrastructure engineering experience.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Information Technology / Systems
Cloud Computing / DevOps Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3 to 5 years building and managing infrastructure, automation and cloud/deployment platforms.

Preferred:

5+ years (or more) of experience in infrastructure/deployment automation roles, including cloud platforms, container orchestration, monitoring frameworks and end‑to‑end lifecycle ownership.