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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Infrastructure Engineer

💰 $80,000 - $140,000

ITInfrastructureEngineeringSystemsCloudNetwork

🎯 Role Definition

An IT Infrastructure Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing, maintaining and optimizing the on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure that supports business applications and services. This role combines systems administration, network engineering, virtualization, storage, security, automation and monitoring to ensure high availability, performance, scalability and compliance. The ideal candidate is experienced with hybrid cloud architectures (AWS/Azure/GCP), virtualization platforms (VMware/Hyper‑V), infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform/CloudFormation), configuration management (Ansible/Chef/Puppet), and has a strong operational mindset for incident response, capacity planning and continuous improvement.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator / Server Administrator
  • Network Administrator / Network Engineer
  • IT Support Engineer / Desktop Support Technician

Advancement To:

  • Senior Infrastructure Engineer / Lead Infrastructure Engineer
  • Infrastructure Architect / Cloud Architect
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) / DevOps Lead
  • IT Operations Manager / Head of Infrastructure

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Cloud Engineer
  • Security Engineer / Cybersecurity Analyst
  • Storage or Backup Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, deploy and maintain enterprise server infrastructure (Windows Server, Linux distributions) to support business applications, ensuring reliability, patching, performance tuning and lifecycle management.
  • Architect, provision and manage hybrid cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) including VPC/Networking, IAM, compute, storage and managed services to meet availability and security requirements.
  • Implement and operate virtualization platforms (VMware vSphere, Hyper‑V, KVM) including host clustering, VM provisioning, resource scheduling, HA/DR configurations and firmware/driver lifecycle updates.
  • Configure and maintain network infrastructure (routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers) and ensure secure, high-performance connectivity across data centers and cloud regions.
  • Manage storage and backup systems (SAN, NAS, iSCSI, NFS), design capacity plans, implement tiering and snapshots, and validate restore procedures for recovery time and point objectives.
  • Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates and modules using Terraform, CloudFormation or ARM to automate environment provisioning and enforce configuration consistency.
  • Build and maintain configuration management and automation pipelines using Ansible, Chef, Puppet or equivalent to standardize server builds, patching and application deployments.
  • Create, maintain and optimize CI/CD integrations for infrastructure changes, collaborating with development and DevOps teams to reduce deployment friction and improve release cadence.
  • Implement containerization and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes) for application delivery, manage clusters, networking overlays and persistent volumes in production.
  • Configure, tune and operate monitoring, observability and logging stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, Nagios) to provide actionable alerts, SLA reporting and capacity forecasting.
  • Lead incident response and root cause analysis for infrastructure outages, coordinate cross-functional war rooms, communicate status to stakeholders and implement post-incident corrective actions.
  • Implement security controls and hardening standards across infrastructure components, including host-based controls, patch management, firewall rules, segmentation, and compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI).
  • Administer identity and access management solutions (Active Directory, Azure AD) including group policies, SSO/SAML integrations, privileged access management and lifecycle of service accounts.
  • Design and execute disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plans, run DR failover tests, document RTO/RPO expectations and ensure alignment with business stakeholders.
  • Manage third-party vendors, cloud providers and managed services contracts for infrastructure components; negotiate SLAs and coordinate support escalation paths.
  • Perform capacity and cost optimization analyses across compute, storage and network; implement rightsizing, autoscaling, reserved instances and tagging strategies to control cloud spend.
  • Maintain infrastructure documentation, runbooks, network diagrams and configuration inventories to support onboarding, audits and knowledge transfer.
  • Implement and maintain backup, archival and retention policies for critical systems and data, validating restores and ensuring legal/regulatory retention compliance.
  • Mentor junior engineers, conduct technical reviews, create runbooks and deliver training to operations staff to elevate team capability and reduce knowledge silos.
  • Lead or participate in infrastructure projects including migrations, upgrades, datacenter consolidation and cloud adoption programs, providing technical design, risk assessments and test plans.
  • Evaluate new technologies and proof-of-concepts (PoCs) to improve infrastructure resiliency, automation and security posture; produce whitepapers and ROI analysis for leadership.
  • Ensure change management and release coordination for infrastructure changes, following ITIL or agreed organizational processes to minimize operational risk.

Secondary Functions

  • Maintain CMDB accuracy and tag resources to support asset tracking, billing and compliance reporting.
  • Support periodic internal and external audits by providing evidence, remediation plans and implementing recommended controls.
  • Collaborate with application owners to specify infrastructure requirements, perform environment sizing and optimize deployment architectures.
  • Participate in on-call rotation to provide 24/7 operational support and rapid remediation for critical incidents.
  • Contribute to capacity planning, trending analyses and provide recommendations for hardware refresh cycles and cloud capacity purchases.
  • Provide cost modeling and cloud cost governance recommendations, create budgets and monitor spending against forecasts.
  • Create and deliver infrastructure-related documentation, runbooks, training sessions and internal knowledge base articles for operational excellence.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce manual tasks through scripting, automation and process standardization.
  • Participate in security vulnerability assessments and penetration testing remediation activities alongside the security team.
  • Facilitate cross-team project meetings, set technical acceptance criteria, and map out roll-back and validation plans for production changes.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep systems administration experience: Windows Server (2012/2016/2019/2022), Active Directory, Group Policy, and common enterprise Linux distributions (RHEL, Ubuntu, CentOS).
  • Strong networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, VLANs, BGP/OSPF, VPN (IPSec/SSL), routing/switching, load balancers and firewall configuration (Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto).
  • Proficient with virtualization platforms: VMware vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, Hyper‑V, including HA/DR and storage integration.
  • Cloud platform expertise: provisioning and operating services in AWS, Azure or Google Cloud (EC2, VPC, S3, IAM, Azure VNet, GCP Compute).
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates for reproducible, versioned infrastructure provisioning.
  • Configuration management and automation: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack and scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell) for repeatable operations.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), Helm charts and persistent storage integrations.
  • Monitoring, logging and observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Datadog, New Relic or equivalent; alerting and SLA management.
  • Storage and backup technologies: SAN/NAS, NetApp, EMC, backup solutions like Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, Veritas NetBackup.
  • Security and compliance: hardening standards, vulnerability management, encryption, IAM, network segmentation and experience supporting SOC2/ISO/PCI audits.
  • Identity and access management: Active Directory, Azure AD, LDAP, SAML, OAuth and single sign-on integrations.
  • Networking appliances and load balancing: F5, HAProxy, NGINX, Cisco ASA/Firepower or Palo Alto firewalls.
  • Experience with CI/CD tooling and pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) for infrastructure deployments.
  • Monitoring of cloud costs and optimization tools (native cost explorers, CloudHealth, Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management).

Soft Skills

  • Excellent written and verbal communication; able to translate technical details for non-technical stakeholders and produce clear runbooks.
  • Strong troubleshooting and analytical skills with a methodical approach to root cause analysis and incident post-mortems.
  • Proactive mindset for identifying opportunities to automate, optimize and harden infrastructure before problems occur.
  • Collaborative team player who partners with development, security, and product teams to deliver stable, scalable platforms.
  • Project management and prioritization skills to juggle operational tasks, change windows and long-term initiatives.
  • Customer-focused orientation; ability to manage stakeholder expectations and deliver timely operational updates.
  • Attention to detail and documentation discipline to maintain compliance and reproducibility.
  • Adaptability to learn new cloud services, tooling and evolving infrastructure patterns quickly.
  • Mentorship ability to coach junior engineers and promote knowledge sharing within the team.
  • Strong sense of ownership and accountability for service-level performance and uptime.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in a related field or advanced certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect, VMware VCP, RHCE, CCNP.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–8 years of progressive experience in systems administration, network engineering or infrastructure operations.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years managing enterprise infrastructure with demonstrable experience in hybrid cloud architectures, virtualization (VMware/Hyper‑V), automation (Terraform/Ansible), container orchestration (Kubernetes) and production incident management. Experience supporting regulated environments (SOC2/PCI/HIPAA) and large-scale distributed systems is a strong plus.
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