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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Officer

💰 $ - $

ITInfrastructureOperations

🎯 Role Definition

The Infrastructure Officer is a hands-on technical leader responsible for designing, implementing, operating, and securing the organization's IT infrastructure. This role owns on‑premises and cloud infrastructure components—servers, storage, networking, virtualization, backup and disaster recovery, monitoring, and system automation—and partners with application teams, security, and vendors to ensure resilient, scalable, and cost‑effective compute and network services that meet business SLAs and compliance requirements.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator / Network Administrator
  • Cloud Engineer / Junior Infrastructure Engineer
  • IT Operations Analyst

Advancement To:

  • Senior Infrastructure Officer / Infrastructure Manager
  • Head of Infrastructure / IT Operations Manager
  • Cloud Platform Lead / Director of IT Operations

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer / Platform Engineer
  • Cybersecurity Analyst / Security Operations Lead
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the design, implementation, and ongoing management of enterprise infrastructure including servers (Windows/Linux), virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper-V), and storage systems to ensure high availability, performance, and scalability across production and non-production environments.
  • Architect and manage private, public, and hybrid cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP), including migration planning, landing zone design, cost optimization, and governance to support modern application delivery and business continuity.
  • Design, configure, and maintain enterprise networking infrastructure (LAN, WAN, SD-WAN), routing and switching (Cisco, Juniper), VLANs, VPNs, and wireless technologies to maintain secure and performant connectivity across sites.
  • Implement and maintain security controls for infrastructure: network segmentation, firewalls (Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco ASA), IDS/IPS, NAC, endpoint hardening, and secure configuration baselines in collaboration with the security team to meet compliance and audit requirements.
  • Develop, implement, and test backup, restore, and disaster recovery strategies (including DR drills) to ensure RTO/RPO compliance and rapid recovery from outages or data loss events.
  • Define and execute capacity planning and performance tuning for compute, storage, and network resources; analyze trends and forecast growth to avoid service degradation and to plan hardware and cloud resource procurement.
  • Implement infrastructure automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, or PowerShell DSC to standardize deployments, reduce manual changes, and accelerate environment provisioning.
  • Operate and extend centralized monitoring, logging, and observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic) to provide actionable metrics, alerting, incident correlation, and SLA dashboards for key systems.
  • Manage patching, change control, and lifecycle management for servers, network equipment, firmware, and virtual infrastructure to reduce security risk and maintain supported configurations.
  • Provide 2nd/3rd level technical support for escalated infrastructure incidents, perform root cause analysis, and lead post-incident reviews with actionable remediation plans to prevent recurrence.
  • Establish and maintain robust configuration management, asset inventory, and documentation for all infrastructure components, runbooks, and standard operating procedures to support operational continuity and auditability.
  • Implement and maintain identity and access management for infrastructure components, integrating with Active Directory/LDAP, enforcing least privilege, MFA, role-based access, and privileged access management (PAM) where applicable.
  • Own vendor relationships, evaluate hardware and software vendors, negotiate contracts and support agreements (SLAs), and manage third-party maintenance, on-site services, and warranties to ensure reliable supplier performance.
  • Design and enforce change management and release processes aligned with ITIL practices, coordinating with stakeholders to minimize business impact and ensure traceability of infrastructure changes.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives to optimize infrastructure cost, performance, automation coverage, and operational efficiency using metrics and key performance indicators.
  • Lead cross-functional projects for infrastructure upgrades, data center refreshes, cloud adoption, and network modernization, preparing project plans, risk registers, resource estimates, and communications to stakeholders.
  • Securely integrate infrastructure with CI/CD pipelines and development workflows to enable scalable, repeatable deployments and to support platform engineering and DevOps practices.
  • Maintain compliance with relevant standards and regulations such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, and industry-specific controls through technical controls, documentation, and evidence collection for audits.
  • Manage physical data center or co-location provider relationships, power and cooling requirements, rack and cabling standards, and on-site operational readiness.
  • Mentor and train junior infrastructure staff and cross-functional teams on platform architecture, operational procedures, security best practices, and automation patterns to build internal capability and resiliency.
  • Establish disaster recovery and business continuity documentation, coordinate tabletop exercises, and update plans based on lessons learned and changing business priorities.
  • Monitor and optimize backup and retention policies across on-prem and cloud systems, ensuring recoverability for critical business data and applications while balancing storage cost.

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 application teams with infrastructure-related deployments, troubleshooting, and capacity assessments.
  • Provide input to procurement for hardware, software, and cloud services, ensuring technical requirements and future scalability are considered.
  • Support security incident investigations by providing infrastructure logs, observability data, and system forensics when required.
  • Evaluate and pilot emerging infrastructure technologies (container platforms, edge compute, serverless patterns) to recommend practical adoption strategies.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Server administration: Windows Server (2016/2019/2022) and major Linux distributions (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu) — installation, hardening, and troubleshooting.
  • Virtualization & hypervisors: VMware vSphere, vCenter, ESXi; Microsoft Hyper-V; familiarity with KVM or other hypervisors.
  • Cloud platforms: Hands-on experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (compute, networking, storage, IAM, VPC/VNet).
  • Infrastructure as Code & automation: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, PowerShell, Bash scripting for automated, repeatable infrastructure deployment.
  • Networking: LAN/WAN design, VLANs, routing protocols (OSPF, BGP), VPNs, load balancers, and experience with Cisco/Juniper networking gear.
  • Security tools & practices: Firewalls (Palo Alto, Fortinet), IDS/IPS, endpoint management, vulnerability scanning, patch management, and secure configuration frameworks.
  • Backup & disaster recovery: Configure and manage enterprise backup solutions (Veeam, Commvault, native cloud snapshots) and DR runbooks.
  • Monitoring & observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Splunk, Datadog or equivalent for metrics, logging, alerting, and dashboards.
  • Containers & orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) fundamentals and integration with infrastructure.
  • Storage systems: SAN/NAS, iSCSI, NFS, storage tiering and performance tuning.
  • Identity & access management: Active Directory, LDAP, SSO/SAML, MFA, and privilege management.
  • Configuration & asset management: CMDB, ITSM tools (ServiceNow, Jira), and ITIL-aligned processes.
  • Performance tuning & capacity planning: Tools and methodologies to analyze resource utilization and forecast growth.
  • Scripting & programming basics: Python, PowerShell, or Bash for automation, integrations, and data handling.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving and analytical skills with an emphasis on root cause analysis and preventive action.
  • Excellent communication and stakeholder management; able to translate technical concepts for non-technical audiences and present infrastructure proposals to leadership.
  • Project management and organizational skills to manage concurrent initiatives, vendor delivery, and change controls.
  • Collaboration and team leadership: mentor engineers, coordinate cross-functional teams, and drive consensus across groups.
  • Attention to detail and documentation discipline to maintain runbooks, SOPs, and compliance artifacts.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning mindset to keep pace with evolving infrastructure and cloud technologies.
  • Customer-service orientation to support internal teams and external stakeholders with infrastructure needs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a related field and relevant professional certifications (e.g., CCNA/CCNP, AWS Certified SysOps/Architect, Microsoft Azure Administrator/Architect, VMware VCP, CompTIA Security+, CISSP, ITIL Foundation).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years of progressive experience in IT infrastructure, systems, or network administration, with demonstrable experience operating enterprise-scale environments.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years in infrastructure design, cloud operations, or platform engineering with hands-on leadership of projects, vendor management, and cross-functional collaboration.
  • Proven experience with cloud migrations, IaC automation, disaster recovery planning, security compliance, and large-scale monitoring/observability implementations.
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