Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Technical Operations Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

The Technical Operations Engineer is responsible for operating and improving production infrastructure to ensure high availability, performance, and security of services. This role combines hands-on systems and cloud engineering with automation, monitoring, and incident response, partnering closely with development, product, and security teams to deliver reliable customer-facing systems. The ideal candidate brings deep experience with cloud platforms, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, and a track record of reducing toil through automation.

Key SEO keywords: Technical Operations Engineer, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), cloud operations, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, AWS, GCP, monitoring, incident response, CI/CD, automation.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Systems Administrator or Senior DevOps Engineer with hands-on cloud experience
Cloud Operations Engineer or Production Support Engineer
Site Reliability Engineer I or Infrastructure Engineer

Advancement To:

Senior Technical Operations Engineer / SRE Lead
Site Reliability Engineering Manager or Head of Operations
Cloud Infrastructure Architect / Principal DevOps Engineer

Lateral Moves:

DevOps Engineer / CI-CD Engineer
Platform Engineer or Cloud Automation Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Own and operate production services end-to-end: manage deployments, scale infrastructure, and maintain service health, working to meet defined SLAs and SLOs.
Design, implement and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) using Terraform/CloudFormation/ Pulumi to provision cloud resources reproducibly and securely across environments.
Build and maintain Kubernetes clusters (EKS/GKE/AKS) and associated platform components (Ingress, Service Mesh, CSI drivers) to support microservices at scale.
Create, maintain, and improve CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins/GitLab CI/GitHub Actions/ArgoCD) to enable reliable, repeatable deployments and automated rollback strategies.
Lead incident response for production outages: perform triage, coordinate cross-functional remediation, drive RCA (root cause analysis) and publish blameless postmortems with corrective actions.
Implement robust observability: design and configure metrics, distributed tracing, and logging using Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and ELK/EFK stacks to provide actionable alerts and dashboards.
Automate operational tasks and reduce manual toil by developing scripts and tools (Python/Bash/Go) and integrating them into standard workflows.
Implement and enforce security best practices in infrastructure and deployments: manage IAM policies, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), network segmentation, and vulnerability scanning.
Monitor and optimize performance and capacity: perform capacity planning, autoscaling tuning, cost optimization, and resource utilization reviews to meet performance and budget targets.
Manage and maintain network infrastructure components and troubleshoot issues across VPCs, load balancers, DNS, and service mesh to ensure reliable connectivity and routing.
Develop and maintain runbooks, playbooks, and on-call procedures for operational readiness; ensure knowledge transfer across the team and maintain runbooks documentation.
Collaborate with engineers and product teams to design systems for resilience, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation; influence architecture decisions for operational excellence.
Implement service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets; measure and report reliability metrics, and work with product teams to prioritize reliability debt.
Perform platform upgrades, patching, and lifecycle management for cloud OS images, container runtimes, and orchestration components in coordination with release windows.
Integrate and maintain infrastructure monitoring and security tools (SIEM, WAF, IDS/IPS) to ensure operational security posture and compliance with policy and regulatory requirements.
Provide on-call coverage and rapid troubleshooting for incidents, using structured diagnostics to reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recovery (MTTR).
Drive environment provisioning and lifecycle for development, QA, staging, and production to ensure parity and reliable deployment promotion practices.
Partner with QA and SRE to design and run disaster recovery and failover exercises, and maintain backups, replication, and recovery procedures.
Implement and enforce CI/CD gating, automated testing, and canary/blue-green deployment patterns to reduce release risk and improve uptime.
Evaluate and onboard new tooling and platforms—container runtimes, orchestration systems, observability solutions—leading POCs and adoption plans.
Track and report operational KPIs to leadership: uptime, incident counts, SLOs, cost trends, and automation impact metrics.
Mentor junior engineers and contribute to hiring, onboarding, and process improvements to scale the operations function.
Maintain vendor and cloud provider relationships for support escalations and to leverage platform capabilities and negotiated terms.
Collaborate with security and compliance teams to run audits, remediate findings, and incorporate compliance controls into IaC and pipelines.
Participate in cross-team architecture reviews to vet operational concerns and cost implications early in the product lifecycle.

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.
Provide input to product managers on operational feasibility, risk, and deployment complexity.
Assist in developing internal platform services and developer self-service capabilities to reduce overhead on central Ops teams.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Cloud Platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure): provisioning, networking, IAM, managed services, cost optimization and best practices.
Kubernetes & Containerization: running production workloads on Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS), Helm, container image lifecycle, and security.
Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi): authoring modular, version-controlled infrastructure with testing and drift detection.
CI/CD Tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD): pipeline development, automation of build/test/deploy, and release strategies.
Observability & Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic): metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and dashboard creation.
Scripting & Automation (Python, Bash, Go): automation of operational tasks, tooling, API integrations, and custom utilities.
Linux Systems Administration: performance tuning, process management, logging, systemd, package management, and kernel troubleshooting.
Networking Fundamentals: TCP/IP, routing, load balancing, DNS, VPNs, VPC design, and security groups/NACLs.
Security & Compliance: secrets management (Vault), encryption at-rest/in-flight, vulnerability management, and basic cloud security controls.
Incident Management & RCA: structured incident response, blameless postmortems, mitigation strategies, and corrective action tracking.
Database Operations & Caching: basic administration and performance tuning for PostgreSQL/MySQL, Redis, and managed DBs.
Configuration Management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet): automated configuration, orchestration, and environment consistency.
Release & Change Management: gating, canary deployments, blue/green strategies, feature flags and rollback processes.
Monitoring & Cost Optimization: instrumentation for cost visibility, rightsizing, reserved instances, and billing governance.
API & Service Integration: familiarity with REST/gRPC services, authentication, rate limiting, and service-level contracts.

Soft Skills

Strong written and verbal communication: clearly document runbooks, incident reports, and architectural decisions for technical and non-technical audiences.
Problem-solving and analytical thinking: break down complex production issues methodically to identify root causes and solutions.
Cross-functional collaboration: work effectively with engineering, product, security, and support teams to align operations priorities.
Sense of ownership and accountability: take responsibility for production health and follow through on remediation and improvements.
Prioritization and time management: balance reactive incident work with proactive projects and automation initiatives.
Mentoring and knowledge sharing: help junior engineers grow and promote best practices across teams.
Resilience under pressure: remain effective during on-call incidents and high-severity outages.
Adaptability and continuous learning: stay current with cloud and DevOps trends and quickly adopt new tools and processes.
Customer-centric mindset: understand how operational work impacts end users and prioritize reliability improvements accordingly.
Stakeholder management: influence roadmap decisions by articulating operational risk, cost, and reliability tradeoffs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related technical field.
Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, or HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years in operations, DevOps, SRE, or cloud engineering roles.

Preferred:

5+ years operating production systems at scale with demonstrable impact on reliability and automation.
Experience with public cloud providers (AWS/GCP/Azure), Kubernetes in production, IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), CI/CD pipelines, observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana/ELK), and on-call incident handling.
Proven track record of driving reliability improvements, reducing MTTR/MTTD, and implementing automation that reduces operational toil.