Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Operations Manager

💰 $120,000 - $170,000

ITOperationsInfrastructureManagement

🎯 Role Definition

The Infrastructure Operations Manager leads the operational lifecycle of an organization's IT infrastructure—on‑premises and cloud—ensuring availability, performance, security, and cost efficiency. This role manages a team of engineers and SREs, defines runbooks and incident response procedures, drives automation and configuration management, partners with security and application teams, and owns operational KPIs (SLAs/SLIs/MTTR/MTTA). The manager balances strategic platform improvements with hands‑on oversight of daily operations, vendor relationships, and continuous improvement programs.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Systems Engineer with operational leadership responsibilities
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Senior DevOps Engineer
  • IT Operations Lead / Technical Operations Manager

Advancement To:

  • Director of Infrastructure / Director of IT Operations
  • Head of Site Reliability Engineering
  • VP of Infrastructure or CTO (in smaller organizations)

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Architect
  • Platform Engineering Manager
  • Security Operations (SecOps) Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead, coach, and scale a cross‑functional infrastructure operations team (systems engineers, SREs, network and storage admins) to deliver 24x7 support and achieve SLA targets while fostering a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and blameless postmortems.
  • Own the incident management lifecycle: detect, triage, coordinate, escalate, communicate, remediate, and lead post‑incident reviews to reduce MTTR and drive corrective actions that prevent recurrence.
  • Design, implement, and maintain robust monitoring, alerting, and observability stacks (metrics, logs, traces) to provide actionable intelligence for capacity planning and proactive incident detection across cloud and on‑prem environments.
  • Define and track operational KPIs and SLIs/SLAs (availability, latency, error rate, MTTR) and present monthly/quarterly operational dashboards and incident trend analyses to senior engineering and business stakeholders.
  • Build and execute disaster recovery and business continuity plans, including DR testing, failover procedures, RTO/RPO definition, and runbooks to ensure resilience of critical services.
  • Drive cloud operations and cost optimization initiatives across AWS/Azure/GCP—rightsizing, reserved instance/commitment strategies, tagging, and cost allocation to meet budget targets while maintaining performance.
  • Manage infrastructure lifecycle and capacity planning: forecast demand, perform trend analysis, plan hardware refreshes, and procure resources to avoid resource contention and service degradation.
  • Lead configuration management, infrastructure as code (IaC) development and governance (Terraform, CloudFormation), ensuring reproducible, auditable, and secure infrastructure deployments.
  • Implement and mature automation and orchestration practices (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Terraform, CICD pipelines) to reduce manual toil, accelerate deployments, and improve consistency across environments.
  • Oversee networking and security operations for infrastructure: load balancers, firewall rules, VPNs, VPC/subnet design, and integration with security tooling to enforce least privilege and segmentation.
  • Collaborate with application and product teams to architect scalable, highly available platforms and to support release planning, performance testing, and operational readiness reviews.
  • Drive vendor and third‑party relationships for data center colocation, cloud providers, managed services, and hardware suppliers—manage SLAs, escalations, and contract negotiations to align with business requirements.
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory, audit and corporate security standards across infrastructure operations, participating in audits and implementing remediation for control gaps (ISO, SOC2, PCI, HIPAA as applicable).
  • Own patching and maintenance windows policy and execution, coordinating change management to minimize downtime and ensure system integrity across clusters and server fleets.
  • Establish and evolve runbooks, standard operating procedures, and knowledge base articles to enable reliable incident response and consistent operational practices across teams and shifts.
  • Lead security hardening and vulnerability remediation programs for infrastructure components, integrate vulnerability management outputs with prioritization workflows, and collaborate with security teams for threat mitigation.
  • Drive migration projects (on‑prem → cloud, lift-and-shift, replatforming) by creating migration plans, runbooks, cutover strategies, and validating performance, security, and cost post‑migration.
  • Implement and maintain backup, snapshot, and restore processes for critical workloads; validate restoration procedures with regular testing and continuous improvement of backup SLAs.
  • Conduct root cause analysis and lead corrective action plans following major incidents, and implement monitoring and architectural changes to prevent recurrence.
  • Manage budgets, forecasting, and CAPEX/OPEX decisions for infrastructure, including hardware refresh cycles, cloud spend, and managed service subscriptions.
  • Establish cross‑team SLA agreements (SRE/DevOps/Platform/Applications) and coordinate on capacity, performance, and security initiatives that span multiple engineering domains.
  • Develop career growth plans, hiring plans, and training programs for the operations team to close skills gaps and maintain high availability of institutional knowledge.
  • Lead platform modernization efforts such as containerization (Kubernetes), service mesh adoption, and platform-as-a-service offerings to improve developer productivity and operational stability.
  • Participate in architecture reviews and technology evaluations to select platform tooling, observability solutions, backup and recovery technologies, and automation frameworks that meet operational goals.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad‑hoc operational investigations and performance tuning in collaboration with engineering teams to diagnose application infrastructure interactions.
  • Coordinate with business continuity and risk teams to update recovery priorities and validate that critical business functions meet recovery objectives.
  • Contribute to the organization’s infrastructure strategy and roadmap by identifying areas for platform consolidation, cost savings, and operational risk reduction.
  • Collaborate with security, compliance, and privacy stakeholders to translate regulatory requirements into operational controls and monitoring.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies for platform and operations workstreams to ensure alignment with engineering delivery and reliability goals.
  • Mentor engineers on best practices for observability, automation, and secure operations, and act as a subject matter expert for escalations and architecture decisions.
  • Facilitate capacity and performance testing for major releases and new product launches to ensure infrastructure readiness and scalability.
  • Drive documentation standards for runbooks, deployment guides, and operational playbooks to preserve institutional knowledge and reduce incident recovery time.
  • Coordinate cross-functional change advisory board (CAB) activities and approve high-risk changes in production under agreed policy and maintenance windows.
  • Evaluate emerging infrastructure technologies and provide recommendations and pilot programs to drive operational efficiency and resilience.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud platform administration and operations (AWS, Azure, GCP) with hands‑on experience managing compute, storage, networking, and IAM at scale.
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and configuration management (Ansible, Puppet, Chef) to provision and maintain reproducible environments.
  • Container orchestration and platform operations: Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS), Helm, and container lifecycle management.
  • Observability and monitoring stack design and management (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, ELK) including alerting, dashboards, and tracing.
  • Systems administration across Linux and Windows server platforms; strong competence in shell scripting (Bash), PowerShell, and Python for automation.
  • Networking fundamentals and operational experience: TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing (HAProxy, NGINX, ALB), VPNs, firewall rules, and VPC design.
  • Virtualization and hypervisor management (VMware vSphere, KVM) and hybrid cloud integration.
  • Incident management, on-call operations, root cause analysis, and postmortem facilitation to continuously improve reliability.
  • Security, compliance, and vulnerability management for infrastructure (hardening, patching, identity & access management, encryption).
  • CI/CD tooling and platform integration (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Argo CD) to support automated deployments and rollbacks.
  • Backup, replication and disaster recovery technologies and strategy design (Veeam, NetBackup, cloud-native backup solutions).
  • Cost optimization and governance for cloud resources, tagging strategies, and budgeting tools.
  • Familiarity with access controls, IAM governance, and secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager).

(At least 10 of the above are commonly required across infrastructure operations job postings.)

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership and people management: mentoring, performance reviews, hiring, and building high-performing teams.
  • Clear and empathetic communication for technical and non‑technical stakeholders, including executive reporting.
  • Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration to align operations with product and business objectives.
  • Proactive problem solving and decision‑making under pressure with an operationally rigorous mindset.
  • Project and program management skills: prioritization, roadmap planning, and delivery tracking.
  • Vendor management and negotiation skills to manage SLAs and third‑party relationships effectively.
  • Change management and ability to drive adoption of new tooling and processes in distributed teams.
  • Business acumen: translating technical trade-offs into business risks, costs, and benefits.
  • Coaching and mentoring to develop engineers’ careers and promote knowledge transfer.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning to keep pace with evolving infrastructure and cloud-native technologies.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, or related technical field; OR equivalent practical experience leading infrastructure operations.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering Management, or MBA; or advanced technical certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Systems
  • Electrical or Computer Engineering
  • Cybersecurity / Information Assurance

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12 years of progressive experience in IT infrastructure, site reliability, or operations roles.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years of hands‑on systems and network administration and 3+ years managing teams and operational programs.
  • Proven experience operating production infrastructure at scale in cloud and hybrid environments.
  • Demonstrated success with incident management, DR planning, infrastructure automation, and cost governance.
  • Preferred certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect / AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Microsoft Azure Administrator/Architect, Google Cloud Professional, CISSP, PMP, ITIL Foundation.
Explore More Careers