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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Lead Infrastructure Engineer

💰 $150,000 - $220,000+

ITInfrastructureDevOpsCloud EngineeringSite Reliability Engineering

🎯 Role Definition

Are you a seasoned engineer passionate about building rock-solid, scalable, and automated infrastructure? Do you thrive on mentoring others and setting the technical direction for a team? If so, we invite you to apply for the Lead Infrastructure Engineer position.

As our Lead Infrastructure Engineer, you will be the technical cornerstone of our platform engineering team. You will spearhead the design, implementation, and maintenance of our global cloud infrastructure, which serves as the foundation for all our products and services. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will not only solve our most complex technical challenges but also guide and elevate the skills of a talented team of engineers. You will be empowered to drive our infrastructure roadmap, champion best practices in DevOps and SRE, and make a tangible impact on our company's success.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Infrastructure Engineer
  • Senior DevOps Engineer
  • Cloud Architect
  • Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Advancement To:

  • Principal Infrastructure Engineer
  • Manager/Director of Infrastructure
  • Head of Platform Engineering
  • Principal Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Principal DevOps Engineer
  • Solutions Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the architectural design and hands-on implementation of highly available, scalable, and fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure, primarily on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
  • Mentor, coach, and provide technical leadership to a team of infrastructure and DevOps engineers, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and operational excellence.
  • Develop and own the long-term strategic roadmap for our infrastructure, ensuring it aligns with engineering-wide initiatives and future business goals.
  • Champion and enforce Infrastructure as Code (IaC) best practices, leading the development of reusable and maintainable modules using Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation.
  • Architect, build, and optimize robust, secure, and efficient CI/CD pipelines to enable rapid, high-quality software delivery for the entire engineering organization.
  • Oversee the administration, scaling, and security of our container orchestration platforms, primarily Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, or AKS), including its networking and storage subsystems.
  • Drive key automation initiatives across the organization to eliminate manual processes, reduce toil, and improve the overall efficiency and reliability of our systems.
  • Define, implement, and audit cloud security best practices in collaboration with the security team, including IAM policies, network security groups, and vulnerability management.
  • Act as the incident commander during critical production outages, leading the troubleshooting and resolution efforts, and conducting blameless post-mortems to prevent recurrence.
  • Establish and govern a comprehensive observability strategy, implementing and managing monitoring, logging, and alerting systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK Stack).
  • Manage cloud provider relationships and lead cost optimization efforts through resource rightsizing, reserved instances, and implementing FinOps best practices.
  • Continuously evaluate emerging technologies, tools, and industry trends, making data-driven recommendations for their adoption to enhance platform capabilities.
  • Collaborate closely with software development teams to define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for critical applications.
  • Design, test, and maintain our disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plans to ensure the resilience of our most critical services.
  • Lead the planning and execution of large-scale infrastructure projects, such as cloud migrations, data center decommissions, or major platform re-architecting efforts.
  • Own and evolve our configuration management strategy, utilizing tools like Ansible or Puppet to ensure consistency and compliance across all environments.
  • Develop and maintain a repository of high-quality technical documentation for infrastructure architecture, standard operating procedures, and incident runbooks.
  • Serve as the ultimate subject matter expert and technical escalation point for all infrastructure-related challenges and inquiries.
  • Guide the team in the practical application and refinement of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles to improve system reliability and performance.
  • Perform deep-dive performance analysis and tuning for cloud infrastructure, databases, and underlying application services to ensure optimal user experience.
  • Lead the technical design review process for new services and applications, ensuring they meet rigorous operational, security, and scalability standards before deployment.
  • Define and manage granular access control policies (IAM) across all cloud services to enforce the principle of least privilege and maintain a strong security posture.
  • Spearhead the design and implementation of our core network infrastructure, including VPCs, subnets, transit gateways, routing, and firewall policies in a multi-account cloud environment.

Secondary Functions

  • Participate in a managed on-call rotation to ensure 24/7 system availability and rapid response to critical incidents.
  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis that require deep infrastructure knowledge.
  • Contribute to the organization's broader technology strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data and performance needs into concrete engineering requirements.
  • Participate in and help facilitate sprint planning, retrospectives, and other agile ceremonies within the platform team.
  • Create and deliver technical presentations and training sessions to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Expert-level, hands-on experience with AWS is strongly preferred. Proficiency with Azure or GCP is also highly valued.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Mastery of Terraform for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure is essential.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Deep expertise in Docker and Kubernetes (K8s), including cluster administration, scaling, networking (CNI), and security hardening.
  • CI/CD & Automation: Proven ability to architect and manage complex, end-to-end CI/CD pipelines using tools like GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or CircleCI.
  • Configuration Management: Proficiency with Ansible, Puppet, or a similar tool for automating system configuration and software deployment.
  • Scripting & Programming: Strong scripting ability in languages like Python, Go, or Bash for creating automation tools and system integrations.
  • Observability & Monitoring: Expertise in implementing and managing modern monitoring stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or the ELK/EFK Stack.
  • Cloud Networking: A solid, practical understanding of core networking concepts, including VPCs, DNS, TCP/IP, load balancing, and network security.
  • Infrastructure Security: In-depth knowledge of security best practices for the cloud, including IAM, secrets management (e.g., HashiCorp Vault), and vulnerability remediation.
  • Linux/Unix Systems: Advanced administration, performance tuning, and troubleshooting skills in a Linux-based production environment.
  • Databases & Storage: Experience supporting and optimizing both relational (e.g., PostgreSQL, RDS) and NoSQL (e.g., Redis, DynamoDB) database systems.

Soft Skills

  • Leadership & Mentorship: A natural ability to guide, inspire, and develop the technical skills of fellow engineers.
  • Strategic Thinking: The capacity to see the bigger picture, anticipate future needs, and align technical strategy with business objectives.
  • Exceptional Communication: The ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, both verbally and in writing.
  • Complex Problem-Solving: A systematic, analytical approach to troubleshooting and resolving difficult, often ambiguous, technical issues.
  • Project Management & Ownership: A strong sense of ownership and the ability to drive complex projects from conception to completion.
  • Collaborative Mindset: A team-player attitude with a proven track record of working effectively across different engineering teams.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's Degree in a relevant technical field or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related engineering discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Systems Engineering
  • Software Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 8-12+ years in infrastructure engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles.

Preferred:

  • At least 3-5 years of experience in a formal or informal lead capacity, with demonstrated experience in technical mentorship and project leadership.
  • A proven track record of designing, building, and operating large-scale, business-critical systems in a public cloud environment.
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