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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Build Analyst

💰 $ - $

IT OperationsInfrastructureBuild & Release

🎯 Role Definition

An IT Build Analyst is responsible for designing, building, configuring, testing and deploying infrastructure and application environments across development, test, staging and production. The role acts as a bridge between development, release engineering and operations teams to ensure repeatable, secure, and auditable build and release processes, leveraging automation (Infrastructure as Code), configuration management and CI/CD pipelines. Ideal candidates have hands-on experience with server builds (Windows/Linux), virtualization, cloud provisioning (Azure/AWS), scripting (PowerShell/Bash), and enterprise tools such as VMware, Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, ServiceNow and CMDB systems.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Systems Administrator or Server Build Technician transitioning into build automation.
  • Application Release Coordinator or Junior DevOps Engineer with scripting experience.
  • Infrastructure Support / Platform Support Engineer with exposure to provisioning and deployments.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Build / Release Engineer with ownership of CI/CD strategy.
  • Release Manager or Build & Release Lead responsible for release governance and cross-team coordination.
  • DevOps Engineer or Infrastructure Automation Engineer focused on IaC and platform reliability.

Lateral Moves:

  • Systems Engineer (Windows/Linux specialist)
  • Cloud Engineer (Azure/AWS build and automation focus)
  • Configuration Management Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, develop and maintain automated server and application build processes using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM templates, CloudFormation) to create repeatable, version-controlled environment provisioning across dev/test/stage/prod.
  • Build, configure and validate Windows and Linux server images, hardening configurations, and application deployment packages to meet security, compliance and operational standards.
  • Implement, maintain and optimize CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps) for automated builds, artifact management, integration testing and promotion between environments.
  • Develop and maintain configuration management code (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) to ensure consistent environment configuration, patching, and drift remediation across physical, virtual and cloud hosts.
  • Create and maintain PowerShell, Bash and Python scripts for automation of provisioning, configuration, health checks, and lifecycle management of infrastructure and application components.
  • Coordinate and execute build and release activities, including packaging, versioning, deployment, rollback procedures, and release burn-down reporting in alignment with release calendars and change windows.
  • Collaborate with application teams, QA, security and network teams to translate requirements into build specifications and ensure deployments meet performance, security and connectivity expectations.
  • Maintain and update build documentation, runbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs) and configuration baselines to ensure operational knowledge sharing and audit-readiness.
  • Manage build artifacts and repositories (Artifactory, Nexus, Git) including retention policies, artifact promotion, and dependency resolution to ensure reproducible deployments.
  • Provision and manage virtualized and cloud infrastructure resources (VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Azure, AWS) including templates, snapshots, storage allocation and network configuration.
  • Perform pre-deployment validation and post-deployment verification testing, including smoke tests, health checks and automated functional tests to reduce production incidents.
  • Integrate security and compliance checks into the build pipeline (secret scanning, vulnerability scans, CIS benchmarking) and work with Security teams to remediate findings prior to release.
  • Maintain and update CMDB entries and asset inventories for build-related infrastructure and coordinate changes with ServiceNow/ITSM for approvals and change tracking.
  • Troubleshoot build, deployment and environment issues root-cause analysis, implementing long-term fixes and documenting known issues and workarounds for the operations team.
  • Lead platform and environment onboarding for new applications and services, including capacity estimation, environment sizing, networking requirements, and dependencies mapping.
  • Participate in on-call rotations to support urgent build and deployment failures, rollback scenarios and coordination with cross-functional incident response teams.
  • Drive platform improvements and cost optimization initiatives by analyzing usage patterns, decommissioning unused resources and recommending right-sizing strategies.
  • Execute patching, image refreshes and configuration updates for build infrastructure, coordinating with teams to minimize downtime and meet compliance windows.
  • Collaborate in agile ceremonies (sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives) and contribute to backlog grooming for build and infrastructure automation tasks.
  • Prepare and present release readiness reports, deployment runbooks, and post-deployment reviews to stakeholders and governance forums (Change Advisory Board).
  • Validate integration points with networking, storage and database teams to ensure environment build automation includes correct network segments, storage mounts and secure communication.
  • Partner with third-party vendors for specialized build components, troubleshooting vendor-supplied deployment tools, and ensuring SLAs are met for build-related services.
  • Implement monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Datadog) for build orchestration systems and key environment health metrics to proactively identify failures.
  • Ensure backup and recovery processes are part of environment builds and perform periodic DR test support to validate restore procedures for configuration and environment state.
  • Continuously evaluate new tools and frameworks for build automation, performing proof-of-concept evaluations and recommending adoption roadmaps aligned to enterprise standards.

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 training and mentoring junior build engineers and cross-functional staff on build processes and automation techniques.
  • Participate in compliance audits and provide build pipeline evidence, logs and change histories as requested by auditors.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Server build and image management for Windows Server and major Linux distributions (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu) — strong practical experience in building, hardening, and maintaining OS images.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools: Terraform, ARM templates, CloudFormation — experience authoring reusable modules and maintaining state.
  • Configuration management: Ansible, Puppet or Chef — authored playbooks/manifests for configuration drift prevention and application deployments.
  • CI/CD pipelines and orchestration: Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Bamboo — building multi-stage pipelines with artifact promotion and automated tests.
  • Scripting and automation: PowerShell, Bash, Python — writing maintainable scripts for provisioning, orchestration and operational automation.
  • Virtualization and hypervisor platforms: VMware vSphere, Hyper-V — template creation, cloning, and lifecycle management.
  • Cloud platforms and services: Microsoft Azure and/or AWS — experience provisioning compute, networking, storage and identity resources.
  • Containerization basics: Docker and familiarity with orchestration (Kubernetes) for modern application builds and CI workflows.
  • Version control systems: Git, branching strategies, merge/pull request workflows and artifact management (Artifactory, Nexus).
  • Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLAN, firewall rules and load balancer configuration as they relate to environment builds.
  • ServiceNow or comparable ITSM tools for change management, incident tracking and CMDB updates.
  • Monitoring and logging tools: Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ELK stack or Datadog — instrumenting build pipelines and environment health.
  • Security, compliance and auditing: knowledge of CIS benchmarks, vulnerability scanning tools and secure configuration best practices.
  • Database environment provisioning basics: SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL — creating dev/test DB instances and connection configuration (preferred).
  • Release management and change control processes, familiarity with CAB procedures and production freeze windows.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent communication skills — able to translate technical build details to non-technical stakeholders and present release readiness clearly.
  • Strong stakeholder management — coordinate across development, QA, security, networking and business teams to deliver builds on schedule.
  • Problem solving and analytical mindset — diagnose complex deployment failures, identify root causes and implement durable fixes.
  • Detail-oriented — produce accurate runbooks, change tickets and configuration documentation required for audits and repeatable builds.
  • Time management and prioritization — manage multiple concurrent builds, changes and customer requests in fast-paced release cycles.
  • Team player and collaborator — work effectively in cross-functional Agile teams and mentor junior engineers.
  • Adaptability and learning agility — evaluate and adopt new automation tools, cloud services and processes as technology evolves.
  • Customer service orientation — provide production support with a calm, methodical approach and strong follow-up.
  • Decision-making under pressure — make informed rollback or remediation decisions during high-impact incidents.
  • Continuous improvement mindset — proactively identify automation opportunities and process improvements to reduce manual work and increase reliability.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline — or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, IT, Systems Engineering or related field.
  • Additional certifications such as Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator, AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate), Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) or VMware Certified Professional (VCP) are advantageous.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science or Software Engineering
  • Information Technology / Systems Administration
  • Network Engineering or Cloud Computing
  • Cybersecurity (for secure build practices)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3 to 6+ years in systems administration, build engineering, release engineering, or DevOps roles focused on infrastructure provisioning and deployment automation.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years experience building and automating enterprise server and application environments, with demonstrable projects using Terraform/Ansible and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Proven track record supporting production deployments, incident response, and performing root cause analysis for complex build/deployment failures.
  • Experience working in regulated environments (finance, healthcare, government) or with strict compliance/audit requirements is highly desirable.

Certifications (recommended): ITIL Foundation, Microsoft/Azure or AWS associate-level certs, Terraform Associate, Certified Jenkins Engineer or vendor-specific virtualization certifications.

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