Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

The Infrastructure Engineer is responsible for designing, building, operating, and optimizing the foundational systems that power applications and services. This role spans cloud and on‑prem environments and focuses on automation, reliability, security, and scalability. The Infrastructure Engineer collaborates with development, security, and operations teams to ensure high‑availability platforms, efficient CI/CD pipelines, and resilient network and storage architectures.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Systems Administrator with strong scripting and automation experience
Network Engineer or Network Administrator seeking cloud + automation exposure
Junior DevOps Engineer or Platform Engineer transitioning to infrastructure ownership

Advancement To:

Senior Infrastructure Engineer / Lead Infrastructure Engineer
Infrastructure Architect / Cloud Architect
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager or Platform Engineering Manager
Head of Infrastructure / Director of Cloud Operations

Lateral Moves:

DevOps Engineer / Platform Engineer
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Cloud Engineer / Cloud Native Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Design, deploy, and maintain production infrastructure across public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and on‑premise environments, ensuring scalability, high availability, and cost efficiency.
Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar, to provision and manage cloud resources reliably and reproducibly.
Build and maintain automation for system provisioning, configuration management, and software deployment using tools like Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or SaltStack.
Design, operate, and optimize CI/CD pipelines and release automation (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Argo CD) to accelerate safe delivery of application changes.
Deploy, operate, and scale container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE) and manage container lifecycle, Helm charts, and service meshes where appropriate.
Monitor infrastructure health and performance using observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic); create dashboards, alerts, and runbooks for SLO/SLI adherence.
Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost optimization efforts for compute, storage, and network resources in cloud and data center environments.
Design and implement secure network topologies, VPNs, load balancers, and firewall/security group rules; collaborate with security teams on hardening and compliance.
Maintain and operate Linux and Windows server fleets, performing patch management, baseline hardening, and lifecycle maintenance.
Develop and maintain backup, snapshot, and disaster recovery strategies and run periodic DR tests to meet RPO/RTO objectives.
Implement identity and access management (IAM) best practices, policies, and automation for least privilege across cloud accounts and infrastructure.
Troubleshoot and resolve complex production incidents, perform root cause analysis, and lead post‑incident reviews with actionable remediation plans.
Integrate logging, metrics, and tracing across distributed systems to improve observability, incident detection, and forensic capabilities.
Create and maintain clear infrastructure documentation, runbooks, run‑time playbooks, and architecture diagrams for handover and on‑call readyness.
Collaborate with application and QA teams to define infrastructure requirements, deploy test and staging environments, and support release validation.
Manage infrastructure change control, configuration drift detection, and environment parity between development, QA, and production.
Implement encryption, key management, and secrets management solutions (HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault) to secure sensitive information.
Build and operate edge and CDN configurations, caching strategies and distributed storage considerations to improve global performance and latency.
Participate in procurement and vendor evaluation for hardware, cloud services, and managed services to support infrastructure strategy and budgeting.
Mentor junior engineers, conduct knowledge transfers, and promote best practices in automation, reliability engineering, and secure operations.
Drive cross‑team technical projects to modernize legacy systems, migrate workloads to cloud or containers, and adopt GitOps practices.
Evaluate, pilot, and introduce new infrastructure technologies and tools to reduce toil, improve reliability, and accelerate developer productivity.
Maintain compliance artifacts and support audits (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI) related to infrastructure controls, logging, and access management.

Secondary Functions

Support ad‑hoc infrastructure requests, environment snapshots, and short‑term remediation tasks for project teams.
Contribute to the organization's infrastructure roadmap and technical strategy with cost and risk trade‑off analysis.
Assist in onboarding new hires and provide infrastructure orientation and environment access setup.
Participate in sprint planning, agile ceremonies, and cross‑functional architecture reviews to align infrastructure work with product goals.
Track operational expenditure (cloud spend), propose optimization actions, and report usage trends to finance and engineering leadership.
Coordinate with procurement and vendors for hardware refresh cycles, support contracts, and cloud provider negotiations.
Maintain a prioritized backlog of technical debt items and run modernization initiatives (OS upgrades, containerization, IaC migrations).
Run regular security and compliance checks, remediations, and collaborate with InfoSec on vulnerability management.
Provide L2/L3 escalation support during on‑call rotations, prepare incident timelines, and update stakeholders during critical events.
Facilitate capacity and disaster recovery planning exercises and update runbooks based on results and lessons learned.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Strong Linux administration skills (RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu) and comfortable with Windows Server management.
Expertise with major cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform (compute, networking, storage, IAM).
Proficient with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) for reproducible, versioned infra deployments.
Configuration management and automation experience with Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or similar tools.
Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), Helm, and experience operating clusters at scale.
CI/CD tooling and pipeline automation (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Argo CD), including release strategies (blue/green, canary).
Monitoring, logging, and observability stack experience (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry).
Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, VPNs, BGP, VPC architecture, subnetting and security groups.
Scripting and programming: Python, Bash, PowerShell, or Go for automation, tooling, and operational playbooks.
Security and compliance: IAM best practices, secrets management (Vault, Secrets Manager), encryption, and vulnerability remediation.
Backup, snapshotting, and disaster recovery planning for databases and stateful workloads.
Familiarity with database infrastructure operations (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis) and durable storage strategies.
Observability and performance tuning skills including profiling, resource optimization, and bottleneck analysis.
Experience with cost management and cloud billing optimization tools and practices.
Knowledge of Git, version control workflows, and collaborative code review processes.
Experience with load testing, chaos engineering practices, and resilience testing is a plus.

Soft Skills

Strong written and verbal communication: writing runbooks, documentation, and incident reports clearly and concisely.
Problem solving and analytical thinking: pattern recognition under pressure and systematic troubleshooting.
Collaboration and stakeholder management: work effectively with developers, product managers, security, and finance.
Prioritization and time management: balancing urgent incidents with long‑term platform improvements.
Mentoring and coaching: upskilling junior engineers and promoting automation-first thinking.
Ownership and accountability: follow through on incidents, remediation, and project delivery.
Adaptability and continuous learning: keep pace with rapidly evolving cloud and infrastructure technologies.
Attention to detail and process orientation for operational excellence and compliance readiness.
Customer and service mindset: design infrastructure with developer productivity and user experience in mind.
Resilience and calm under pressure during production incidents and high‑impact outages.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in a technical field or advanced certifications (AWS Solutions Architect/DevOps Engineer, Azure Administrator/Architect, Google Professional Cloud Engineer).
Professional certifications such as CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator), RHCE, HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate are highly desirable.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Information Systems / IT Management
Network Engineering / Telecommunications
Computer Engineering
Cybersecurity / Information Assurance

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years of infrastructure, systems, cloud or platform engineering experience.

Preferred: 5+ years operating production infrastructure, with demonstrable experience in public cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), IaC, container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and incident response. Prior experience in regulated environments (PCI, SOC2, HIPAA) or large distributed systems is a plus.