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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Operations Specialist

💰 $ - $

ITOperationsInfrastructureDevOpsSystems

🎯 Role Definition

The IT Operations Specialist is a hands-on technical professional responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, performance, and security of an organization’s IT infrastructure and services. This role focuses on day-to-day operations—monitoring systems, responding to incidents, executing change controls, automating routine tasks, maintaining backups and disaster recovery plans, and collaborating with development, security, and business teams to meet service level agreements (SLAs). Ideal candidates combine systems administration, networking, automation, and strong customer service skills to deliver consistent, measurable operational outcomes.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator / Junior Systems Engineer
  • IT Support Analyst / Desktop Support
  • Network Technician / Infrastructure Support

Advancement To:

  • Senior IT Operations Engineer / Lead IT Operations Specialist
  • Infrastructure Manager / IT Operations Manager
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) / Cloud Operations Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Security Operations Analyst
  • Cloud Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Monitor and maintain uptime and performance of servers, virtual machines, network devices, cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP) and on-premise infrastructure using industry-standard monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic), proactively identifying and resolving potential incidents before business impact.
  • Lead first- and second-line incident response: triage alerts, perform root-cause analysis, coordinate cross-functional remediation activities, document incident timelines and post-incident reviews to reduce recurrence and improve MTTR (Mean Time To Repair).
  • Manage, maintain, and automate configuration and provisioning of infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CM tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, or Chef to ensure reproducible, version-controlled environments.
  • Maintain and administer Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, and related identity services; implement secure authentication and authorization best practices across servers and applications.
  • Design, test, and execute backup and disaster recovery strategies for critical systems and data, perform regular restore validation, and coordinate recovery drills to meet RTO/RPO objectives.
  • Implement and enforce change control and release management processes: review change requests, perform impact analysis, schedule maintenance windows, and verify post-change system stability.
  • Maintain virtualization and container platforms (VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, KVM, Docker, Kubernetes), including deployment, scaling, patching, and lifecycle management of virtual and containerized workloads.
  • Perform systems hardening, patch management, and vulnerability remediation in collaboration with security teams to ensure compliance with internal policies and external regulations (e.g., SOC2, ISO27001).
  • Operate and optimize on-premise and cloud networking: troubleshoot routing, switching, firewalls, load balancers, VPNs, and ensure network segmentation and secure connectivity for applications.
  • Build and maintain operational runbooks, run schedules, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for routine operations and major incident handling; continuously update documentation to reflect live environment changes.
  • Create and maintain automation scripts (PowerShell, Bash, Python) for routine maintenance, monitoring remediation, service provisioning, log rotation, and bulk administration tasks to reduce manual intervention and human error.
  • Administer enterprise management and deployment tools (SCCM/Endpoint Manager, JAMF, Intune) to support OS deployment, patching and configuration compliance across user and server fleets.
  • Operate service management and ticketing systems (ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk) to manage incidents, service requests, changes, and to drive SLA adherence and customer satisfaction metrics.
  • Implement logging, centralized log collection and analysis (ELK/Elastic Stack, Splunk, Fluentd) to support forensic investigations, performance tuning, and capacity planning.
  • Collaborate with application development and QA teams to support CI/CD pipelines, integrate operational checks into deployments, and accelerate safe, repeatable releases using Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, or GitHub Actions.
  • Perform capacity planning, resource forecasting and cost optimization for both on-premise and cloud infrastructure to ensure predictable performance and efficient spend.
  • Monitor and manage storage systems and data services (SAN, NAS, cloud storage), including provisioning, performance tuning, lifecycle management, and tiering strategies.
  • Ensure compliance with backup retention, data privacy and regulatory requirements by working with legal and compliance teams to implement controls and evidence collection.
  • Conduct performance tuning and root-cause analysis for high-impact incidents; recommend architectural or process changes to address chronic issues and improve reliability.
  • Provide hands-on escalation support for complex user and application issues, mentoring junior ops staff and sharing operational knowledge across teams to improve the organization’s operational maturity.
  • Participate in on-call rotations and maintain detailed, actionable on-call handover notes; respond to critical incidents outside normal business hours when required.
  • Track and report operational KPIs (uptime, MTTR, MTTD, change success rate, ticket backlog) and present insights and improvement plans to technical leadership on a regular cadence.
  • Collaborate with Security, Compliance, and Risk teams on incident response playbooks, vulnerability patching: escalate and remediate high-risk findings with measurable remediation timelines and verification.
  • Manage third-party vendor relationships for infrastructure services, hosting providers and managed services, ensuring contractual SLA delivery, timely escalations, and coordinated problem resolution.
  • Conduct routine audits of configurations, accounts, role-based access controls (RBAC), and system logs to detect anomalies, enforce least-privilege access and reduce insider risk.

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 with onboarding and offboarding processes for new and departing employees, ensuring accounts, devices and access rights are provisioned or revoked per policy.
  • Support vendor and software license inventory management and renewal coordination to maintain software continuity.
  • Provide training and guidance to non-technical staff on operational best practices, troubleshooting steps and secure tool usage.
  • Participate in cross-functional projects such as cloud migrations, major upgrades, office moves, and technology refresh initiatives.
  • Help evaluate and pilot new operational tooling and automation platforms; provide feedback and adoption plans for production rollout.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Incident management & ITIL-aligned service management: incident, problem and change management processes and tooling (ServiceNow, BMC Remedy).
  • Systems administration: Windows Server, Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS), macOS basics for endpoint support.
  • Cloud operations: AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform — provisioning, monitoring, IAM, cost optimization and hybrid architectures.
  • Virtualization & containers: VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Docker, Kubernetes (k8s) operations and troubleshooting.
  • Scripting & automation: PowerShell, Bash, Python for automating repetitive tasks; hands-on with Ansible, Terraform, or similar IaC tools.
  • Monitoring & observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Nagios, or Zabbix for metric collection, alerting, and dashboards.
  • Logging & analytics: ELK/Elastic Stack, Splunk, Fluentd, or Cloud-native logging for search, correlation, and investigation.
  • Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, VLANs, routing, switching, firewalls, VPNs, load balancing and network performance troubleshooting.
  • Identity & access management: Active Directory, LDAP, SSO, MFA, SAML/OAuth, Group Policy management and RBAC best practices.
  • Backup & disaster recovery: enterprise backup systems, replication, snapshot management and DR planning with validated restore procedures.
  • Security fundamentals: patch management, endpoint protection, hardening, vulnerability assessment tools and remediation workflows.
  • Database basics: SQL troubleshooting, connectivity, backup/restore considerations for operational impact analysis.
  • CI/CD and DevOps tooling: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions and experience collaborating with development teams on deployment pipelines.
  • Endpoint management: SCCM, Intune, JAMF or equivalent for lifecycle, patching and configuration compliance.
  • Performance tuning & capacity planning: analyzing trends, forecasting, resource optimization and financial stewardship of infrastructure spend.

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication tailored to technical and non-technical stakeholders; able to write clear runbooks and incident postmortems.
  • Customer service orientation with ability to prioritize business impact and drive timely resolutions under pressure.
  • Analytical problem-solving and structured troubleshooting methodologies.
  • Team collaboration and cross-functional stakeholder management with empathy and negotiation skills.
  • Time management, prioritization and the ability to handle multiple concurrent incidents or projects.
  • Continuous improvement mindset, curiosity and willingness to learn emerging tools and cloud-native operational patterns.
  • Detail-oriented with strong documentation habits and a focus on reproducible, automated solutions.
  • Mentoring and knowledge transfer: coach junior engineers and share operational best practices.
  • Adaptability and resilience when dealing with ambiguity and rapidly changing technical environments.
  • Project coordination and basic project management skills to drive operational initiatives end-to-end.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Associate degree or equivalent technical certification (e.g., CompTIA Network+/Security+, Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator) or demonstrated equivalent work experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems, Engineering, or related technical field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Systems
  • Network Engineering
  • Cybersecurity
  • Cloud Computing / DevOps

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–5 years for mid-level IT Operations Specialist roles; 5+ years for senior or specialized operational positions.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrated experience operating production services at scale across on-premise and cloud environments, participation in on-call rotations, incident management ownership, automation of operational tasks, and familiarity with regulatory/compliance controls (SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA where applicable).

Keywords: IT Operations Specialist, incident management, ITIL, monitoring, cloud operations, AWS, Azure, Linux, Windows Server, Active Directory, virtualization, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, scripting, backups, disaster recovery, ServiceNow, observability, DevOps, service level agreements (SLA).

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