Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Production Engineer

💰 $120,000 - $190,000

EngineeringDevOpsSite ReliabilityIT

🎯 Role Definition

As a Production Engineer, you are the guardian of our production environment. Your mission is to build robust, automated systems that can scale effortlessly while maintaining the highest standards of availability and performance. You will proactively identify and eliminate potential issues before they impact our customers, working closely with software engineers to instill a culture of reliability and operational excellence across the organization. You thrive on solving complex problems, automating everything, and building systems that are as resilient as they are efficient.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Software Engineer
  • Systems Administrator
  • DevOps Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior / Lead Production Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager
  • Principal Engineer / Staff Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • Software Architect
  • Cloud Security Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, build, and operate highly available, scalable, and fault-tolerant production infrastructure on cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure.
  • Develop and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines to automate the build, testing, and deployment of our services, enabling rapid and reliable software delivery.
  • Champion Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles, using tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and Ansible to manage our environment declaratively and ensure consistency.
  • Implement and manage comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK Stack) to ensure full observability into system health.
  • Define, measure, and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) to meet and exceed reliability targets.
  • Act as a primary responder for production incidents, leading troubleshooting efforts to minimize downtime and performing deep-dive post-mortems and root cause analysis (RCA).
  • Proactively perform capacity planning and performance tuning to ensure our systems can handle future growth and traffic spikes.
  • Automate manual operational tasks and processes by developing scripts and tools, primarily using languages like Python, Go, or Bash.
  • Manage and scale containerized workloads using orchestration platforms like Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS) and container runtimes like Docker.
  • Collaborate with software engineering teams during the design phase to consult on reliability, scalability, and operability of new features and services.
  • Drive the adoption of reliability best practices, including chaos engineering, disaster recovery testing, and blameless post-mortems.
  • Enhance system security by implementing and enforcing security best practices, managing access controls, and responding to potential vulnerabilities.
  • Participate in a periodic on-call rotation to ensure 24/7 coverage and rapid response to critical production issues.
  • Optimize cloud resource utilization to manage and reduce infrastructure costs without compromising performance or reliability.
  • Manage the reliability and performance of critical stateful systems, including relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL stores (e.g., Redis, Cassandra).

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.
  • Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for systems, processes, and incident runbooks to empower the entire engineering team.
  • Mentor junior engineers and share expertise on best practices for building and maintaining reliable systems.
  • Evaluate and recommend new tools and technologies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the production engineering function.
  • Develop internal tooling and self-service platforms to improve developer productivity and streamline operations.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Deep expertise in at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure), including core services like EC2, S3, VPC, IAM, and RDS.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Hands-on mastery of Docker and Kubernetes for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications in a production environment.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficiency with tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Ansible for automating infrastructure provisioning and configuration management.
  • CI/CD & Automation: Strong experience building and maintaining automated pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or GitHub Actions.
  • Scripting & Programming: Fluency in at least one high-level programming language, such as Python or Go, and strong shell scripting skills (Bash).
  • Observability: Proven ability to implement and manage monitoring and logging solutions (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, ELK Stack).
  • Linux/Unix Systems: In-depth knowledge of Linux operating systems, including system administration, networking, and performance tuning.
  • Networking: Solid understanding of fundamental networking concepts, including TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, load balancing, and firewalls.

Soft Skills

  • Systemic Problem-Solving: A methodical and analytical approach to troubleshooting complex, large-scale distributed systems under pressure.
  • Ownership & Accountability: A deep sense of responsibility for the health of production systems and a proactive, "get-it-done" attitude.
  • Clear Communication: The ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, especially in written form (e.g., post-mortems, design docs).
  • Collaboration & Empathy: A strong collaborative spirit and the ability to work effectively with development teams, understanding their challenges and goals.
  • Calm Under Pressure: The ability to remain composed and focused during critical incidents to drive efficient resolution.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master's Degree in a relevant technical field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3-7 years in a Production Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or senior DevOps role.

Preferred: A proven track record of managing large-scale, mission-critical production systems in a cloud-native environment. Experience in a fast-paced, high-growth technology company is highly desirable.

Explore More Careers