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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Operations Engineer

💰 $70,000 - $120,000

ITOperationsInfrastructureDevOpsSystems Administration

🎯 Role Definition

As an IT Operations Engineer, you will be responsible for ensuring the availability, performance, security, and cost-efficiency of the organization's infrastructure and production services. The role combines systems administration, cloud operations, monitoring/observability, incident response, automation, and cross-functional collaboration to maintain highly available and scalable platforms that support product and business needs.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Helpdesk Technician or Desktop Support with demonstrated escalation handling and scripting experience.
  • Systems Administrator managing on-prem and cloud servers.
  • Network Engineer or Junior DevOps who has owned monitoring and deployment tasks.

Advancement To:

  • Senior IT Operations Engineer / Senior Systems Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) / Platform Engineer
  • IT Operations Manager or Infrastructure Manager
  • DevOps Engineer / Cloud Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Engineer / Cloud Operations
  • Security Engineer / Security Operations (SecOps)
  • Database Administrator or Storage Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Manage day-to-day operation, maintenance and lifecycle of production and non-production servers across Linux and Windows environments, ensuring systems are patched, secure, and compliant with configuration standards.
  • Lead incident response for platform outages and major incidents: quickly diagnose root cause, communicate status to stakeholders, coordinate remediation steps and post-incident reviews to drive permanent fixes and reduce recurrence.
  • Operate and tune monitoring, alerting and observability systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK/Elastic Stack, Splunk) to ensure early detection of performance regressions, capacity issues and service degradation.
  • Implement and maintain automated provisioning and configuration management using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, or Chef to ensure reproducible, auditable infrastructure deployments.
  • Deploy, maintain and optimize cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP) including account architecture, VPC/Networking, IAM, cost monitoring and governance to drive scalability and cost-efficiency.
  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI) and deployment automation to accelerate feature delivery while minimizing downtime and deployment risk.
  • Design and manage containerization and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS/GKE/AKS), including cluster operations, upgrades, scalability and platform hardening.
  • Maintain backup, snapshot and disaster recovery processes for systems, databases and cloud resources; regularly validate recovery procedures and RTO/RPO objectives through scheduled tests.
  • Perform capacity planning, performance tuning and resource optimization across compute, storage and network to support predictable growth and avoid performance bottlenecks.
  • Ensure platform and application security by implementing hardening standards, vulnerability management, patch cycles, secure configuration and integration with security tools (IDS/IPS, firewalls, WAF).
  • Manage service-level agreements (SLAs), SLOs and operational runbooks; create, maintain and enforce runbooks, run-charts and playbooks for common incidents and maintenance tasks.
  • Troubleshoot complex network and application issues across layers (DNS, TCP/IP, load balancers, proxies, SSL/TLS) including root cause identification and permanent remediation.
  • Collaborate with development, QA and product teams to onboard new services, review architecture for operational readiness, and incorporate observability and operational metrics into application design.
  • Automate repetitive operational tasks using scripting (Bash, Python, PowerShell) and create self-service tools or documentation to reduce manual intervention and time-to-resolution.
  • Own patch management and release coordination for infrastructure components, minimizing downtime and coordinating change windows with stakeholders while following ITIL change control processes.
  • Manage and optimize storage platforms, SAN/NAS, object storage and database platform configurations to meet performance, backup and compliance requirements.
  • Coordinate vendor relationships and third-party service providers for hardware, software, cloud services and managed services; track tickets, warranties and escalation paths to resolution.
  • Support and maintain IAM and identity platforms, enforcing least-privilege, role-based access, and auditing access logs for compliance and forensic needs.
  • Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for infrastructure, runbooks, escalation paths, architecture diagrams and operational procedures for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Participate in on-call rotations and provide 24/7 support escalation when required; proactively communicate status, remediation steps and timelines during incidents.
  • Conduct root cause analysis and postmortems for incidents; drive cross-team remediation plans and track corrective actions to closure.
  • Contribute to platform cost optimization initiatives including rightsizing, reserved instances, storage lifecycle policies and monitoring of cloud spend to meet organizational budgets.
  • Participate in architecture reviews and change advisory board meetings to ensure operational concerns (scalability, backups, maintenance windows, monitoring) are addressed before production changes.
  • Implement and enforce logging, tracing and metrics collection across applications and infrastructure to enable rapid troubleshooting, capacity planning, and application performance management.

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.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert in Linux systems administration (RHEL, Ubuntu, CentOS) and strong working knowledge of Windows Server administration, Active Directory and Group Policy.
  • Hands-on experience with cloud platforms: AWS (EC2, S3, IAM, VPC), Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform; ability to design for high availability and cost-efficiency.
  • Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation) and configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
  • Strong scripting skills in Bash, Python or PowerShell for automation, tooling, and incident remediation.
  • Experience operating container platforms and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm) and managing production clusters.
  • Proficiency with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/Elastic Stack, Splunk) and defining effective alerts and dashboards.
  • CI/CD and deployment automation experience with tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, ArgoCD or similar.
  • Networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, routing, load balancing, VPNs, firewall rules) and practical troubleshooting skills.
  • Familiarity with virtualization technologies (VMware vSphere, Hyper-V) and hyperconverged infrastructure concepts.
  • Experience with backup, snapshotting, and disaster recovery solutions and performing DR runbooks and tests.
  • Knowledge of database administration basics (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL) and ability to coordinate with DBAs for operations and performance tuning.
  • Security and compliance experience: patching, vulnerability scanning, IAM, encryption, audit support and regulatory controls (PCI, HIPAA, SOC2) where applicable.
  • Experience with log collection/aggregation, centralized logging, and full-stack tracing to support observability and post-incident analysis.
  • Familiarity with cost monitoring and cloud optimization tools and practices.
  • Ability to use ticketing/ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, Jira, Zendesk) for incident and change management and adherence to ITIL practices.

Soft Skills

  • Strong analytical troubleshooting skills with an emphasis on root-cause identification and resilient remediation.
  • Clear, concise written and verbal communication skills for incident updates, runbooks, and cross-functional collaboration.
  • Customer-focused mindset and ability to work under pressure during high-severity incidents while keeping stakeholders informed.
  • Proven ability to prioritize and manage multiple concurrent operational tasks and projects.
  • Collaborative team player who can work effectively with developers, security, product and business stakeholders.
  • Continuous improvement mindset with a bias for automation and reducing manual toil.
  • Strong documentation discipline and ability to create runbooks, run-charts and knowledge base articles.
  • Time management, adaptability to changing priorities and willingness to participate in on-call rotations.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, or equivalent professional experience in systems or cloud engineering.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a technical field plus relevant certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect / SysOps, Microsoft Azure Administrator, Google Cloud Associate, RHCE, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Network Engineering
  • Cybersecurity
  • Software Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3 to 7 years of hands-on experience in systems administration, cloud operations, or IT infrastructure roles.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of progressive responsibility in IT operations or DevOps environments, demonstrated ownership of production infrastructure, experience with cloud migrations and platform automation, and participation in on-call rotations and incident management. Certifications and proven experience with large-scale distributed systems, container orchestration, and observability tooling are highly desirable.
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