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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Internet Specialist

💰 $ - $

ITNetworkingWebDigital Infrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced Internet Specialist to own the availability, performance, security and operational maturity of internet-facing systems. The ideal candidate combines network engineering, web operations, cloud-native deployment experience, security best practices, and measurable performance optimization skills. This role partners with development, security, product and infrastructure teams to troubleshoot live issues, design resilient architectures, and drive continuous improvements across CDN, DNS, load balancing, firewalls, and web platforms. Strong documentation, incident response experience, and a continuous improvement mindset are required.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Network Engineer
  • Systems Administrator (Web/Cloud)
  • Web Operations / DevOps Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Internet Specialist / Senior Web Reliability Engineer
  • Manager of Web Infrastructure or Network Operations
  • Cloud Platform Architect / SRE Lead

Lateral Moves:

  • Security Engineer (Application/Network)
  • Performance Engineering / Front-End Optimization Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the design, deployment and ongoing operations of internet-facing infrastructure including DNS, CDN, reverse proxies, load balancers, WAFs and edge cache configurations to ensure sub-second response times and high availability across global regions.
  • Architect and implement secure connectivity patterns (TLS/SSL management, HSTS, certificate automation, IP allow lists and mutual TLS where appropriate) to protect customer traffic and internal APIs while maintaining automated renewal and rotation workflows.
  • Own incident response and post-incident remediation for internet outages and degradations, coordinating cross-functional teams, running RCA (root cause analysis), and driving permanent fixes to meet SLA and SLO targets.
  • Monitor and analyze traffic patterns, latency, error rates and resource utilization using observability tools, create dashboards and alerts, and proactively remediate performance regressions before customer impact.
  • Optimize web performance end-to-end by implementing CDN rules, caching strategies, compression, HTTP/2/3 and image optimization, plus collaborating with front-end teams on critical render path improvements to reduce Time to First Byte (TTFB) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
  • Configure, maintain and harden perimeter security controls including WAF rulesets, rate limiting, DDoS mitigation, IDS/IPS tuning and firewall policies to protect against common internet threats while minimizing false positives.
  • Manage DNS architecture and operations including zone design, TTL strategies, traffic steering (geo-load balancing, latency-based routing), DNSSEC, and provider failover to ensure consistent resolution and resilience.
  • Deploy and operate reverse proxy and API gateway platforms (e.g., NGINX, HAProxy, Envoy) for routing, TLS termination, observability and performance isolation across microservices and monoliths.
  • Implement and maintain automation for provisioning and configuration (IaC: Terraform/CloudFormation/Ansible), CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure testing to ensure repeatable, auditable, and low-risk changes to internet-facing infrastructure.
  • Troubleshoot complex network and application-layer issues using packet capture, flow logs, traceroute, tcpdump, and application logs, and synthesize findings into actionable remediation steps.
  • Design and operate secure VPNs, bastion hosts, and access controls to support safe administrative access to internet-facing systems while enforcing least-privilege and MFA for operations.
  • Collaborate with product and development teams to define realistic SLAs and SLOs for web properties, create runbooks and playbooks, and improve on-call efficiency and escalation procedures.
  • Evaluate, onboard and manage third-party internet services (CDN providers, DNS providers, DDoS protection, WAF vendors, observability platforms), negotiating integrations and ensuring proper security/compliance configurations.
  • Implement traffic shaping, connection pooling, and load balancing algorithms to evenly distribute load across clusters, prevent cascading failures, and optimize resource usage under peak traffic events.
  • Lead capacity planning and traffic forecasting for internet services, translating business initiatives into infrastructure requirements, and scheduling scaling or architecture changes ahead of marketing or product launches.
  • Maintain and test failover and disaster recovery plans for public-facing services, performing regular drills, failover simulations and RPO/RTO validations to ensure readiness.
  • Create and maintain technical documentation including architecture diagrams, runbooks, deployment guides, and postmortem reports to ensure knowledge sharing and operational continuity.
  • Drive security and compliance initiatives for public-facing systems, partnering with risk and compliance teams to implement controls for PCI, SOC or GDPR-related internet interactions.
  • Implement logging, tracing and metrics pipelines for internet traffic (access logs, WAF logs, CDN metrics, synthetic monitoring) and enable business and engineering teams to consume actionable insights.
  • Continuously research, prototype and recommend new internet technologies (HTTP/3, edge compute, serverless edge functions, advanced CDN features) that reduce cost, increase performance, or improve security posture.
  • Provide Tier 3 escalation support for complex production issues impacting availability or performance of internet-facing services and mentor junior engineers on incident handling and root cause analysis.
  • Coordinate change windows and release plans for internet-facing configurations, ensuring blue/green or canary strategies are in place to reduce customer impact during updates.

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 in vendor evaluation and procurement for edge services, security tooling, and performance platforms.
  • Train internal teams on DNS, CDN and TLS best practices and provide guidance for release readiness for internet impacts.
  • Help define cost-optimization strategies for bandwidth, CDN caching and cloud egress charges tied to internet traffic patterns.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep knowledge of TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, DNS, CDN architectures, caching strategies and common web performance metrics (TTFB, FCP, LCP, CLS).
  • Hands-on experience with CDN providers and edge platforms (Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, AWS CloudFront) including rulesets, edge functions and cache invalidation strategies.
  • Proficiency in DNS management and advanced routing (split-horizon, geo-DNS, latency-based routing) and DNS security features (DNSSEC).
  • Strong experience with reverse proxies and API gateways such as NGINX, HAProxy, Envoy, Traefik, or commercial load balancers including configuration and tuning.
  • Practical experience with web application firewalls (WAF), DDoS mitigation services, and hardening internet services against OWASP Top 10 threats.
  • Competency with cloud networking and services (AWS/Azure/GCP) including VPC, load balancers, Cloud CDN, NAT, security groups and service endpoints.
  • Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools for internet services (Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Sentry) and ability to create effective dashboards and alerts.
  • Scripting and automation skills (Python, Bash, Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation) to codify infrastructure, manage certificates, and automate operational tasks.
  • Experience with packet capture and network debugging tools (tcpdump, Wireshark, traceroute, mtr) for troubleshooting intermittent internet issues.
  • Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (canary, blue/green, feature flags) to minimize risk for internet-facing changes.
  • Familiarity with security certifications and frameworks (e.g., CIS controls, SOC, PCI) and practical implementation experience for internet services.
  • Understanding of web analytics and synthetic monitoring (Google Analytics, WebPageTest, Lighthouse, synthetic HTTP checks) to correlate performance to user experience.

Soft Skills

  • Strong communicator able to translate technical network and web concepts into business impact for Product and Executive stakeholders.
  • Proven problem-solver with calm, methodical incident handling and prioritization skills during high-severity outages.
  • Collaborative team player who partners effectively with developers, security, product and operations teams.
  • Detail-oriented with a bias for documenting changes, runbooks, and comprehensive postmortem analysis.
  • Adaptable and curious: keeps up with evolving internet standards, edge innovations and security threat landscapes.
  • Customer-focused mindset with an ability to balance risk, speed and usability when making operational decisions.
  • Coaching and mentoring skills to uplift junior engineers and improve team operational maturity.
  • Strong organizational skills with an ability to manage multiple priorities, on-call rotations, and planned change windows.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science / Networking / Cybersecurity or industry certifications such as CCNA/CCNP, CompTIA Network+/Security+, AWS Certified (Networking/DevOps), Google Cloud Network Engineer, or CISSP.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Network Engineering
  • Cybersecurity
  • Telecommunications
  • Web Engineering / Software Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years in network engineering, web operations, SRE, or a closely related field with direct responsibility for production internet-facing systems.

Preferred: 5+ years of demonstrated experience owning DNS/CDN/load balancer/WAF/edge infrastructure for public websites or APIs, plus incident leadership and automation-driven operational practices.

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