Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Software Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

As an Infrastructure Software Engineer, you will design, build, and maintain the foundational systems that enable scalable, secure, and highly available software delivery. You will partner with product and platform teams to automate infrastructure provisioning, improve system reliability, and drive continuous improvement across our cloud and on-prem environments. This role blends software engineering practices with systems and operations expertise to deliver resilient, observable, and cost-effective infrastructure.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior Infrastructure Engineer or DevOps Engineer with 1–3 years of experience.
Cloud Engineer or Systems Engineer transitioning from operations-focused roles.
Software Engineer interested in platform and infrastructure automation.

Advancement To:

Senior Infrastructure / Platform Engineer
Staff/Principal Infrastructure Engineer or Platform Architect
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead or Infrastructure Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Cloud Reliability or Cloud Platform Engineer
Security Infrastructure Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Architect, implement, and maintain scalable cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure) using infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) to ensure reproducible, auditable, and version-controlled environments.
Design and deliver automated CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI) that integrate build, test, security scanning, and deployment steps to accelerate safe and repeatable software delivery.
Build and operate container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, EKS, GKE, AKS), including cluster provisioning, autoscaling strategies, upgrade processes, and multi-cluster topologies.
Develop robust observability and telemetry solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic) to provide actionable metrics, distributed tracing, and centralized logging for rapid incident detection and root-cause analysis.
Implement platform-level reliability and resilience patterns (circuit breakers, rate limiting, redundancy, graceful degradation) to meet SLOs/SLIs and reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).
Automate repetitive operational tasks through software (Python, Go, Bash) and build internal developer tooling that reduces manual toil and improves developer experience.
Design secure infrastructure patterns and enforce security best practices (IAM, encryption at rest and in transit, secret management, VPCs, network policies) in collaboration with security teams.
Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost optimization exercises across cloud and hybrid environments to achieve efficient resource utilization and predictable spend.
Integrate and maintain service mesh and networking solutions (Istio, Linkerd, Envoy) to enable secure, observable inter-service communication.
Create and maintain runbooks, incident response playbooks, and on-call rotation processes to ensure fast, consistent handling of production incidents.
Contribute to architecture reviews and technical design documentation, providing infrastructure constraints and trade-offs for product and platform decisions.
Implement configuration management and state reconciliation solutions (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt) where appropriate to manage fleet-level consistency.
Build and maintain platform APIs and operator patterns (Kubernetes Operators, custom controllers) to enable declarative platform usage by application teams.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to onboard applications to the platform, including migration planning, deployment automation, and testing strategies.
Evaluate, prototype, and introduce new infrastructure technologies and managed services to accelerate platform capabilities while minimizing operational risk.
Enforce CI/CD security gates, dependency scanning, and vulnerability remediation workflows to ensure compliant and secure releases.
Manage backups, disaster recovery plans, and cross-region replication strategies to meet business continuity requirements.
Drive adoption of infrastructure best practices, coding standards, and code review processes across the infrastructure codebase and platform tooling.
Instrument and run chaos engineering experiments and fault-injection tests to validate resilience and improve incident response readiness.
Mentor junior engineers, establish onboarding material for infrastructure projects, and contribute to a culture of continuous learning and platform stewardship.
Coordinate with database and stateful service owners to define operational processes for replication, failover, and maintenance windows.
Implement and maintain identity, access, and secrets management integrations (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager) ensuring least-privilege access controls.
Lead or contribute to regulatory, compliance, and audit activities related to infrastructure (SOC2, ISO, PCI) by providing architecture evidence and remedial plans.
Monitor third-party service dependencies and managed offerings, negotiating SLAs and aligning external service stability with internal reliability objectives.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc infrastructure requests and investigative troubleshooting for performance or reliability incidents.
Contribute to the organization's platform roadmap and influence prioritization of infrastructure investments.
Collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate application requirements into scalable infrastructure designs.
Participate in sprint planning, agile ceremonies, and cross-team syncs to align infrastructure work with product delivery.
Create and maintain developer-facing documentation, onboarding guides, and platform self-service workflows.
Assist security and compliance teams during audits by providing infrastructure diagrams, access logs, and configuration evidence.
Run post-incident reviews, synthesize learnings, and drive permanent fixes and process improvements.
Lead small proof-of-concept initiatives to evaluate new tools, patterns, or cloud services that improve platform velocity.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Infrastructure as Code: Expert with Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation for multi-environment provisioning and modular module design.
Cloud Platforms: Deep operational experience with one or more public clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure), including core services (compute, networking, IAM, storage).
Containerization & Orchestration: Proficient with Docker image lifecycle, Kubernetes (helm charts, operators, CRDs), and cluster lifecycle operations.
Programming & Scripting: Strong software engineering skills in Go, Python, or Java, and shell scripting for automation and tooling.
CI/CD & Build Systems: Hands-on with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar for pipeline creation, artifact promotion, and deployment strategies.
Observability & Monitoring: Experience implementing metrics, logging, and tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry, Datadog).
Networking & Security: Solid understanding of TCP/IP, load balancing, DNS, firewalls, VPC design, and network policy enforcement.
Configuration Management: Familiarity with Ansible, Chef, or similar tools for configuration drift prevention and server lifecycle management.
Secrets & Identity Management: Practical experience with Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or cloud-native secret stores and IAM policy design.
Performance & Scalability: Proven ability to perform load testing, capacity planning, and tuning for high-throughput distributed systems.
Databases & Stateful Services: Operational knowledge of running and backing up databases and stateful services in cloud-native environments.
Observability Automation: Skilled at building alerting thresholds, incident automation, and remediation playbooks.
Reliability Engineering Practices: SRE concepts including SLO/SLI, error budgets, and postmortem process leadership.
Infrastructure Security & Compliance: Implementing hardening, logging, monitoring, and controls to meet SOC2/ISO/PCI standards.

Soft Skills

Strong written and verbal communication, able to document designs, write runbooks, and present technical trade-offs to stakeholders.
Collaborative mindset: comfortable working across product, security, and developer teams to deliver platform capabilities.
Problem-solving and analytical thinking, breaking down complex distributed-system incidents into actionable remediation steps.
Prioritization and time management in ambiguous or fast-moving environments; able to balance immediate incidents with long-term platform investments.
Mentorship and leadership: coaching junior engineers and establishing best practices across teams.
Customer-focused orientation: translate developer needs into usable platform features and improved developer experience.
Continuous learning and curiosity: stay current with cloud-native technologies, open-source projects, and industry trends.
Resilience and composure under pressure during incident response and production outages.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Distributed Systems, or related technical discipline, or equivalent specialized certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Systems Engineering
Network Engineering
Information Security

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of combined software engineering and infrastructure/platform experience; senior roles often require 5+ years designing and operating production cloud infrastructure.

Preferred:

Demonstrated track record operating large-scale cloud-native platforms, with strong examples of automation, cost optimization, and reliability improvements.
Experience contributing to open-source infrastructure projects or internal platform libraries.
Prior exposure to regulated environments (SOC2, PCI, HIPAA) or experience working with security/compliance teams.