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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Infrastructure Specialist

💰 $ - $

🎯 Role Definition

The Infrastructure Specialist is responsible for designing, implementing, operating and evolving the foundational IT systems that support an organization's applications and services. This role spans on-premises and cloud infrastructure, virtualization, networking, storage, monitoring, security hardening, automation (Infrastructure as Code), and incident response. The ideal candidate ensures systems are secure, resilient, cost-effective and scalable while collaborating cross-functionally with development, security and operations teams.

Key search and LLM keywords: Infrastructure Specialist, systems engineer, network administration, cloud engineer, DevOps, AWS/Azure/GCP, Terraform, Ansible, VMware, Kubernetes, monitoring, backup and disaster recovery, security, CI/CD.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator / Network Administrator
  • Junior DevOps Engineer or Cloud Operations Engineer
  • IT Support Engineer with server and network experience

Advancement To:

  • Senior Infrastructure Engineer / Lead Infrastructure Specialist
  • Cloud Architect / Infrastructure Architect
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Platform Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Security Engineer / Cloud Security Specialist
  • Network Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, deploy and maintain resilient infrastructure architectures across cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and on-premises environments, including network, compute, storage, and virtualization layers to meet performance, availability, and security objectives.
  • Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation or ARM templates to automate provisioning, enforce repeatability, and enable version control of infrastructure changes.
  • Build and maintain configuration management and automation pipelines using Ansible, Chef, Puppet or equivalent to ensure consistent server builds, patching, and configuration drift remediation.
  • Administer and optimize virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, or KVM, including VM lifecycle management, templates, resource pools, and clustering for high availability.
  • Architect and operate containerization platforms and orchestration clusters (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS/AKS/GKE), including deployment patterns, namespaces, ingress, and cluster scaling.
  • Design and manage network architecture components including VLANs, routing, VPNs, load balancers (F5, HAProxy, NGINX), firewalls, DNS, and DHCP to ensure secure and performant connectivity.
  • Develop and maintain robust monitoring, alerting, and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK) to provide real-time health, capacity and performance telemetry.
  • Lead capacity planning, performance tuning and cost optimization initiatives for cloud and on-premises infrastructure, providing forecasts and recommendations to stakeholders.
  • Implement and test backup, snapshotting and disaster recovery strategies for critical systems, databases and object stores; document RTO/RPO targets and run regular restore drills.
  • Harden servers, network devices and cloud accounts by applying security best practices, patch management, endpoint protection, least-privilege IAM, and vulnerability remediation in partnership with Security teams.
  • Own incident response for infrastructure outages and degradations: triage incidents, runbooks execution, RCA (root cause analysis), post-incident reporting and corrective actions to prevent recurrence.
  • Manage and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) for infrastructure deployment and integration with application delivery processes.
  • Write, maintain and enforce operational runbooks, SOPs, architecture diagrams, and system documentation to enable on-call rotations and knowledge transfer across the team.
  • Integrate and manage storage systems (SAN, NAS, cloud block/object storage) and storage performance tuning for databases and file services.
  • Coordinate and manage infrastructure change control, release windows and configuration approvals; evaluate risk and maintain change logs for compliance and auditability.
  • Implement centralized logging, log retention and log analysis strategies to support security, compliance and troubleshooting requirements.
  • Automate repetitive operational tasks with scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell) to reduce manual toil and accelerate incident resolution and deployments.
  • Drive vendor management, procurement coordination and lifecycle planning for hardware, software licenses and managed service contracts tied to infrastructure.
  • Collaborate with development and product teams to translate application requirements into infrastructure specifications and SLAs, advising on scalability and resiliency trade-offs.
  • Lead migration projects for applications and services to the cloud (lift-and-shift, re-platforming), including planning, execution, validation and rollback procedures.
  • Participate in cross-functional architecture and security reviews to ensure new services are designed for operability, performance, cost efficiency and compliance.
  • Maintain on-call rotation and perform after-hours support as required to respond to critical incidents and urgent production issues.
  • Monitor and enforce infrastructure tagging, naming conventions, and governance policies to improve cost allocation, traceability and automation.
  • Evaluate new infrastructure technologies and tools, perform proof-of-concepts and recommend adoption strategies that align with business goals and engineering roadmaps.
  • Provide mentorship, training and knowledge sharing to junior engineers and operations staff to raise the overall maturity of the infrastructure organization.

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 Security and Compliance teams during audits by producing infrastructure evidence, configurations and change-history reports.
  • Help onboard new applications and third-party services by validating architecture fit and operational readiness.
  • Participate in procurement and budgeting cycles by estimating infrastructure costs and recommending cost-saving measures.
  • Provide stakeholder updates on infrastructure health, incidents, capacity trends and planned maintenance windows.
  • Support internal training sessions and documentation initiatives to improve cross-team operational capabilities.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience with cloud platforms: AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS), Microsoft Azure (VMs, VNet, RBAC, Blob), and/or Google Cloud Platform (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Storage).
  • Proficient in Infrastructure as Code tools: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Bicep or ARM templates for repeatable, version-controlled provisioning.
  • Configuration management and automation: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack or similar tooling to enforce server state and automate patching.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (k8s), EKS/AKS/GKE administration, Helm charts and cluster networking.
  • Virtualization and hypervisors: VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, or KVM administration including HA, DRS and vCenter.
  • Networking fundamentals and advanced concepts: TCP/IP, BGP, OSPF, VLANs, VPN, NAT, firewalls, load balancing and DNS design.
  • Monitoring, alerting and observability platforms: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK, Splunk.
  • Backup and disaster recovery technologies: Veeam, NetBackup, snapshot policies, cross-region replication and DR runbooks.
  • Security controls and practices: IAM, encryption (in transit and at rest), network segmentation, endpoint security, vulnerability management and compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI).
  • Scripting and automation languages: Python, Bash, PowerShell, and experience building automation for operational tasks.
  • CI/CD and release automation: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker for infrastructure and application deployment.
  • Storage technologies: SAN, NAS, iSCSI, object storage concepts, and performance tuning for block and file systems.
  • Load balancers and reverse proxy experience: F5, HAProxy, NGINX, AWS ALB/NLB.
  • Observability and logging: centralized logging, retention policies, parsing/logstash and dashboarding best practices.
  • Performance tuning and capacity planning: benchmarking, resource optimization and cost forecasting.
  • Familiarity with site reliability engineering practices: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems and automated remediation.
  • Experience with identity and access management systems, SSO/OAuth/SAML and privileged access controls.
  • Hardware lifecycle management and data center operations: racking, cabling, UPS, cooling and vendor coordination.
  • Experience with database infrastructure operations: high availability, backups, replication and performance tuning for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, or NoSQL systems.
  • Knowledge of compliance and audit processes and ability to prepare artifacts and evidence for external audits.

Soft Skills

  • Strong analytical and problem-solving mindset with calm, structured incident management under pressure.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills for handoffs, documentation and cross-functional collaboration.
  • Proven ability to prioritize work, manage multiple projects and balance feature work with operational responsibilities.
  • Customer-oriented approach with a service mindset to internal engineering teams and external stakeholders.
  • Strong collaboration skills: works effectively with Security, Development, Product, and Vendor teams.
  • Meticulous attention to documentation, runbooks and operational checklists to ensure reproducibility.
  • Proactive mindset: identifies technical debt, automation opportunities, and continuous improvement initiatives.
  • Mentoring and team development: ability to coach junior engineers and lead technical onboarding.
  • Adaptability to evolving technology stacks and rapid infrastructure changes.
  • Project management and stakeholder communication to lead migration and optimization initiatives successfully.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in a related technical field or relevant professional certifications (AWS Certified SysOps/DevOps Engineer, Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator/DevOps, Google Professional Cloud Engineer).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of progressive infrastructure, systems, or cloud operations experience.

Preferred: 5+ years of hands-on experience managing production infrastructure across cloud and on-premises environments, demonstrated experience with Infrastructure as Code, container orchestration, and enterprise-scale monitoring and security practices. Experience leading migrations, participating in on-call rotations, and driving cost optimization and resilience improvements is highly desirable.

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