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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Operations Engineer

💰 $ - $

OperationsSite ReliabilityDevOpsCloudInfrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

The Operations Engineer is responsible for ensuring high availability, reliability, performance, and security of production systems and services. This role blends system administration, cloud infrastructure, automation, monitoring, and incident response to maintain SLAs and SLOs. The Operations Engineer works closely with development, security, and product teams to build resilient systems using infrastructure-as-code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, and observability solutions. Strong emphasis is placed on automation, root-cause analysis, runbook creation, capacity planning, and continuous improvement.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Systems Administrator / Linux Administrator
  • DevOps Engineer I or Cloud Support Engineer
  • Software Engineer with strong systems or SRE interests

Advancement To:

  • Senior Operations Engineer / Senior SRE
  • Tech Lead / Infrastructure Engineering Lead
  • Platform Engineer or Cloud Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Platform/Cloud Engineer
  • Security Operations Engineer (SecOps)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own and operate production services end-to-end: provision, deploy, monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize services across AWS, GCP or Azure to meet uptime and performance SLAs; collaborate with developers to ensure smooth release cycles and rollback strategies.
  • Lead incident response and on-call rotations: detect, triage, mitigate, and communicate during production incidents; drive post-incident reviews and implement permanent fixes through root cause analysis and corrective action tracking.
  • Design, implement and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi or equivalent to provision and manage cloud resources reliably and reproducibly.
  • Build and maintain automated CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI) to accelerate safe deployments, enforce deployment policies, and enable progressive delivery patterns (canary, blue/green).
  • Operate and scale container platforms and orchestration systems such as Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS) and Docker, including cluster provisioning, lifecycle management, upgrades, and runtime security.
  • Implement observability and monitoring solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch, ELK/EFK) for metrics, tracing, logging and alerting; tune alerts to reduce noise and improve mean time to detection (MTTD).
  • Develop, maintain and execute runbooks and runbook automation for common operational tasks to reduce manual toil and accelerate incident resolution.
  • Perform capacity planning, performance tuning and resource optimization to manage cost vs. performance trade-offs while maintaining required SLAs.
  • Maintain and enforce configuration management and automation using tools such as Ansible, Chef, or Puppet to ensure consistency across environments.
  • Implement backup, restore, disaster recovery (DR) plans and test recovery procedures regularly to guarantee RPO and RTO targets.
  • Harden infrastructure and services in partnership with security teams: patch management, vulnerability remediation, secrets management, IAM policies, and security incident response.
  • Manage DNS, load balancing (HAProxy, NGINX, AWS ELB/ALB), CDN, and networking configurations for redundancy and low-latency routing.
  • Drive continuous improvement by identifying and eliminating manual operational tasks through scripting and automation (Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell).
  • Create and maintain documentation, runbooks, architecture diagrams, and SLO/SLA definitions to ensure operational transparency and knowledge sharing across teams.
  • Collaborate with product and engineering teams to onboard new services into the platform, define service ownership boundaries, and establish SLIs/SLOs for observability and reliability.
  • Lead change management and release coordination for infrastructure changes, ensuring rollback plans, testing, and stakeholder communication to minimize production risk.
  • Conduct proactive health checks, audits, and operational readiness reviews before major releases or migrations to new environments (cloud or on-prem).
  • Implement cost monitoring and optimization practices (rightsizing, reserved instances, spot instances, autoscaling) in cloud environments to control infrastructure spend.
  • Integrate and manage third-party vendor services and SaaS platforms, ensuring SLAs, connectivity, secure integrations, and vendor escalation paths.
  • Automate provisioning of developer and staging environments to improve developer productivity while maintaining parity with production.
  • Design multi-region/high-availability architectures and implement failover strategies to minimize downtime and support business continuity.
  • Participate in capacity forecasting and procurement planning for compute, storage, and network resources in coordination with finance and procurement.
  • Mentor junior operations staff, lead technical onboarding, and help define operational best practices, standards, and playbooks.
  • Maintain compliance and audit readiness by implementing logging, monitoring, and control frameworks required for GDPR, SOC2, HIPAA, PCI, or other applicable 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 with platform improvements and prototype automation tools to streamline operational workflows.
  • Provide cross-team support for migrations, upgrades, and architectural reviews.
  • Communicate status and risk to stakeholders during planned maintenance and unplanned outages.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong Linux/Unix systems administration skills with deep understanding of kernel tuning, systemd, process management, storage and filesystems.
  • Proficient with cloud platforms: AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure — including networking, IAM, VPC, and managed services.
  • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and container ecosystems (Docker, Helm, operators) for orchestration, scaling, and deployment.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) expertise with Terraform, CloudFormation or equivalent for reproducible infrastructure provisioning.
  • CI/CD pipeline design and automation experience using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar tools.
  • Scripting and automation skills: Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell for operational tooling and automation.
  • Monitoring, logging and observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK/EFK, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry.
  • Configuration management and automation: Ansible, SaltStack, Chef, or Puppet.
  • Networking fundamentals: routing, subnets, DNS, load balancing, SSL/TLS, IPSEC/VPN and firewall rule management.
  • Security and compliance fundamentals: IAM, secrets management (Vault), patching, vulnerability scanning, and incident response.
  • Experience with databases and storage systems (Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, S3) including backups, replication and tuning.
  • Familiarity with release orchestration, blue/green and canary deployments, and feature-flag platforms.
  • Observability-driven development experience: defining SLIs/SLOs, SRE practices for error budgets and service-level objectives.
  • Troubleshooting and root cause analysis using system metrics, distributed tracing, and log analysis.
  • Knowledge of cost optimization strategies in cloud environments (rightsizing, autoscaling, spot instances).
  • Version control and Git workflows for infrastructure and configuration repositories.
  • Experience with incident management tools and practices: PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Statuspage, or similar.

(These technical skills mirror requirements from real operations/SRE job descriptions and are written to be LLM- and SEO-friendly.)

Soft Skills

  • Strong communication and stakeholder management — able to explain technical issues to non-technical audiences and to escalate appropriately.
  • Excellent problem-solving and analytical reasoning with a bias for action under pressure.
  • Collaborative team player who partners across engineering, security, and product teams.
  • Customer-focused mindset with attention to reliability, performance, and usability.
  • Time management and prioritization skills in high-throughput, on-call cycles.
  • Mentorship and coaching ability to uplift junior engineers and share operational context.
  • Proactive mindset: identifies risks and proposes mitigation before incidents occur.
  • Continuous learner: embraces new cloud services, observability stacks, and automation tools.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or related field.
  • Relevant certifications (AWS Certified SysOps Administrator / AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Systems Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Network Engineering
  • Cloud Computing

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–6+ years in systems administration, site reliability, DevOps, or operations engineering roles. (Mid-level)
  • 5+ years for senior or lead operations roles with demonstrable production ownership.

Preferred:

  • Proven track record operating complex distributed systems in production at scale — experience with multi-region deployments, container orchestration, and cloud-native architectures.
  • Experience participating in or leading on-call rotations and incident response at scale.
  • Portfolio of automation work, IaC modules, runbooks, and documented postmortems or operational playbooks.
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