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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Manager

💰 $110,000 - $160,000

ITInfrastructureEngineeringCloud

🎯 Role Definition

The Infrastructure Manager is a senior IT leader responsible for designing, operating, securing, and continuously improving the company's on-premises and cloud infrastructure. This role blends technical ownership (networks, servers, storage, virtualization, cloud services, backups, monitoring) with people leadership, vendor management, budget accountability, and cross-functional program delivery. The Infrastructure Manager partners with security, application teams, DevOps, and finance to deliver resilient, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure solutions that meet SLAs and business objectives.

Key SEO / LLM keywords: Infrastructure Manager, IT infrastructure, cloud migration, hybrid cloud, datacenter, networking, virtualization, VMware, AWS, Azure, Terraform, automation, disaster recovery, cybersecurity, ITIL.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Systems Engineer / Lead Systems Administrator
  • Network Engineering Lead or Senior Network Engineer
  • Cloud Engineer / Senior Cloud Architect

Advancement To:

  • Director of Infrastructure / Head of Infrastructure
  • VP of Technology / Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
  • Head of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) / VP of Engineering (Ops)

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Architect
  • DevOps Engineering Manager
  • Security Engineering Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end design, implementation and operational management of the organization's hybrid infrastructure (on-premises datacenter and cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP), ensuring high availability, scalability, and security across compute, storage, networking and virtualization layers.
  • Own infrastructure strategy and roadmap: translate business requirements into multi-year infrastructure plans (including cloud adoption, datacenter transformation, and consolidation), prioritize initiatives, and track ROI and risk.
  • Manage day-to-day operations for servers (Windows/Linux), virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper‑V), container platforms (Kubernetes), and cloud services, ensuring systems meet defined SLAs and performance targets.
  • Drive cloud migration programs: assess workload suitability, develop lift-and-shift and cloud-native strategies, manage migration execution, and optimize cloud costs using tagging, right-sizing, and reserved instances.
  • Establish and enforce infrastructure standards, architecture patterns, and operational runbooks including IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation), configuration management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet), and version control practices to ensure reproducible and auditable deployments.
  • Implement and maintain comprehensive monitoring and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK) for infrastructure and platform services; define SLOs/SLAs and implement alerting, escalation, and remediation workflows.
  • Own capacity planning and performance tuning: forecast demand for compute, memory, storage and network; implement performance optimization and scaling strategies to avoid outages and bottlenecks.
  • Lead disaster recovery and business continuity planning: design RTO/RPO-aligned DR solutions, run regular DR tests, report outcomes, and remediate gaps to meet compliance and operational requirements.
  • Manage backup and retention strategies using enterprise backup solutions (Veeam, CommVault, Rubrik), ensuring recoverability, quarterly testing of restores, and compliance with regulatory requirements.
  • Oversee patch management and lifecycle management for infrastructure components, coordinating maintenance windows, regression testing, and stakeholder communication to minimize business disruption.
  • Run incident response for major infrastructure incidents: lead post-incident reviews, root cause analysis (RCA), corrective actions, and continuous improvement to reduce MTTR (mean time to recovery).
  • Define and operate robust change management processes, including CAB participation, risk assessments, rollback plans, and documentation to ensure controlled infrastructure changes and reduce service disruption.
  • Develop and manage vendor and third-party relationships: select infrastructure vendors, negotiate contracts and SLAs, manage hardware and cloud service procurement, and ensure vendor performance meets contractual commitments.
  • Create, manage and optimize infrastructure budgets and cost controls: forecast spend, track actuals, justify capex vs opex decisions, and implement cost-saving initiatives (license rationalization, cloud cost optimization).
  • Ensure infrastructure security and compliance: collaborate with security teams to implement network segmentation, firewalls, IAM, vulnerability management, encryption, and logging to meet PCI, SOC2, HIPAA or other regulatory standards.
  • Lead and grow the infrastructure team: recruit, mentor, define roles, set goals and KPIs, conduct performance reviews, and foster a culture of automation, reliability and documentation.
  • Implement automation and self-service platforms to reduce manual toil, accelerate provisioning, and improve developer productivity (CI/CD pipelines, IaC templates, automated runbooks).
  • Maintain inventory, configuration management databases (CMDB), and asset lifecycle records for hardware and software to support audits, renewals, and capacity forecasts.
  • Collaborate closely with application and product teams to design resilient architectures, define non-functional requirements, and perform load and failover testing for new product releases.
  • Lead the adoption of modern platform practices (SRE, DevOps), driving observability, error budgets, and automation to improve uptime and developer experience.
  • Define and measure infrastructure KPIs (availability, incident frequency, MTTR, deployment frequency), produce regular operational reports, and present results to executive stakeholders.
  • Plan and execute datacenter moves, consolidations, or colo transitions, including logistics, cross-team coordination, risk mitigation and cutover execution to minimize downtime.
  • Stay current with industry trends and emerging technologies (edge computing, serverless, platform engineering) and recommend practical adoption plans aligned with business priorities.

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.
  • Assist with onboarding technical teams to infrastructure self-service and platform APIs.
  • Produce and maintain infrastructure documentation, runbooks, and training materials for operations and on-call teams.
  • Participate in cross-functional architecture reviews and security threat modeling sessions.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Hands-on experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform (compute, networking, IAM, storage, cost management).
  • Virtualization & Compute: Expertise managing VMware vSphere, Hyper‑V, and/or KVM; experience with VM lifecycle, HA, DRS and cluster management.
  • Containers & Orchestration: Production experience with Docker and Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), including cluster provisioning, upgrades and networking models.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficient with Terraform and/or CloudFormation to provision and manage cloud and hybrid resources reproducibly.
  • Configuration Management & Automation: Practical experience with Ansible, Chef, or Puppet and scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell) to automate provisioning and operational tasks.
  • Networking & Security: Strong knowledge of TCP/IP, routing, switching, VLANs, VPNs, firewalls, load balancers, and network security best practices.
  • Storage & Backup: Managing SAN/NAS, block and object storage, and enterprise backup/restore solutions (Veeam, CommVault, Rubrik) with proven restore testing.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Implementing and operating systems like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK/EFK, New Relic or Nagios for logs, metrics and tracing.
  • Identity & Access Management: Familiar with Active Directory, LDAP, IAM roles, SSO/SAML, and cloud identity best practices.
  • Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity: Design, test, and operate DR solutions with clear RTOs/RPOs and documented recovery procedures.
  • Infrastructure Networking Services: DNS, DHCP, NAT, CDN configuration and troubleshooting experience.
  • Compliance & Governance: Practical knowledge of SOC2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA or GDPR infrastructure controls and audit readiness.
  • CI/CD & DevOps Tooling: Experience integrating infrastructure provisioning into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions).
  • Performance Tuning & Capacity Planning: Tools and methodologies for profiling and scaling compute, storage and network resources.
  • Hardware & Datacenter Ops: Procurement, racking, cabling, firmware lifecycle, and troubleshooting of physical infrastructure.

Soft Skills

  • Leadership: Proven ability to lead technical teams, set priorities, inspire, and deliver results under pressure.
  • Communication: Clear and concise communicator who can translate technical complexity for executive audiences and business stakeholders.
  • Strategic Thinking: Ability to align operational improvements and technical investments with business goals and financial constraints.
  • Problem Solving: Strong analytical mindset with a structured approach to troubleshooting complex distributed systems.
  • Project Management: Skilled at driving cross-functional projects to completion, managing risk, timelines and stakeholder expectations.
  • Vendor Management: Comfortable negotiating contracts, driving vendor accountability, and evaluating third-party solutions.
  • Mentoring & Coaching: Experience developing individual contributors into senior engineers and fostering a continuous learning culture.
  • Adaptability: Comfortable working in fast-changing environments and able to pivot priorities without losing focus on reliability and security.
  • Initiative & Ownership: Self-driven and accountable for outcomes, with a bias for action and continuous improvement.
  • Collaboration: Builds strong partnerships across engineering, security, product and business teams to deliver integrated solutions.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration (MBA) or related field; relevant professional certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator/Architect, CCNP, VCP).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Network Engineering
  • Systems Engineering
  • Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12 years in IT infrastructure roles, with progressive operational and leadership responsibilities.

Preferred: 8+ years of broad infrastructure experience and at least 3 years managing teams or leading infrastructure programs. Demonstrable track record with cloud migrations, hybrid infrastructure operations, DR exercises, large-scale monitoring/observability implementations, vendor/contract negotiation, and cost optimization initiatives.

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