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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Web Systems Engineer

💰 $90,000 - $150,000

EngineeringDevOpsWebCloudSRE

🎯 Role Definition

The Web Systems Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and operating resilient, secure, and high-performance web platforms and services. This role focuses on the end-to-end lifecycle of web infrastructure — from infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD pipelines to runtime operations, monitoring, incident response, cost optimization, and cross-team enablement. The ideal candidate combines strong Linux and networking fundamentals with cloud-native patterns (containers, Kubernetes, serverless), automation, and observability to deliver reliable user-facing experiences.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator with web and cloud experience
  • DevOps Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Backend Engineer / Full‑stack Engineer with infrastructure focus

Advancement To:

  • Senior Web Systems Engineer / Principal Systems Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineering Lead / Platform Engineering Manager
  • Infrastructure Architect / Cloud Platform Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
  • Release/Build Engineer
  • Security Engineer (Application or Infrastructure Security)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and maintain highly available web hosting environments using cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and on-prem components; own architecture decisions that improve uptime, latency, and scalability.
  • Build and operate containerized production platforms (Docker, Kubernetes) for web applications, including cluster provisioning, lifecycle management, autoscaling, and upgrades with minimal disruption.
  • Create and maintain infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) to provision networks, compute, storage, load balancers, and DNS in a repeatable, auditable manner.
  • Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI) to enable automated, secure, and fast delivery of web services and static assets.
  • Design and tune web server and proxy configurations (Nginx, Apache, Envoy) for performance, caching, SSL/TLS termination, HTTP/2 support, and security headers.
  • Architect and operate global traffic management and load balancing solutions (ALB, NLB, GCLB, CloudFront, CDNs) to optimize latency and availability across regions.
  • Maintain and optimize persistent and in-memory data stores (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Cassandra) for web workloads, including replication, failover, backups, and query/performance tuning.
  • Implement robust monitoring, alerting, and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK) to track service health, SLA/SLI metrics, and proactively detect regressions.
  • Build centralized logging and tracing pipelines (ELK/EFK, Fluentd/Fluent Bit, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry) to support production troubleshooting and incident investigations.
  • Lead on-call rotations and incident response as part of an SRE-style workflow: triage alerts, conduct blameless post-mortems, implement corrective actions, and improve runbooks.
  • Automate repetitive operational tasks using scripting (Python, Bash, Go) and configuration management tools (Ansible, SaltStack) to reduce toil and increase reliability.
  • Harden infrastructure and runtime environments against threats: enforce least privilege, manage secrets, apply host and container security best practices, and collaborate on vulnerability remediation.
  • Manage DNS, SSL/TLS lifecycle, and certificate automation to ensure secure and uninterrupted service access for customers.
  • Perform capacity planning and load testing (k6, JMeter, Locust) to forecast scaling needs and design cost-effective architectures that meet traffic growth.
  • Integrate and manage edge services (CDN, WAF, DDoS protection) to protect and accelerate web-facing endpoints and APIs.
  • Drive cost optimization initiatives: analyze cloud spend, right-size instances, reserve capacity, and select cost-effective storage and delivery patterns.
  • Work closely with application engineers to design production-ready deployments: release strategies (blue/green, canary), feature flags, and rollback mechanisms.
  • Maintain disaster recovery plans, backup and restore procedures, and run periodic failover tests to meet RTO/RPO targets.
  • Lead performance troubleshooting across the stack — network, OS, application server, database — and implement targeted optimizations to reduce latency and errors.
  • Define and enforce standards, templates, and developer-facing platform tooling to enable product teams to self-serve infrastructure safely and reliably.
  • Participate in architectural reviews, evaluate third-party managed services, and influence roadmap decisions for platform evolution and technical debt reduction.
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory and company security policies by maintaining audit logs, access controls, and automated compliance checks.
  • Maintain clear, actionable documentation for runbooks, deployment guides, architecture diagrams, and onboarding materials to reduce mean-time-to-repair and accelerate new team members.
  • Mentor junior engineers, run knowledge-sharing sessions, and collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Security, QA, and Support to deliver business-critical web services.

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 product teams with release validation, smoke testing, and pre/post-deployment checks for web services.
  • Help evaluate and pilot new tools or managed services to accelerate development and operations.
  • Participate in internal audits, compliance assessments, and vendor security reviews related to web infrastructure.
  • Provide onboarding and training materials for developers to adopt platform tooling and best practices.
  • Collaborate on capacity and budget planning conversations to align technical choices with business priorities.
  • Collect and share operational metrics and trends with stakeholders to inform roadmap and SLA decisions.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Linux systems administration: deep experience with troubleshooting, performance tuning, kernel/sysctl tuning, and package management.
  • Cloud platforms: hands-on experience with AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, S3, RDS, Route53, CloudFront), GCP or Azure equivalents.
  • Containerization & orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (Helm, operators, StatefulSets), cluster lifecycle and networking.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi for repeatable provisioning and drift management.
  • CI/CD and automation: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or similar; release automation, pipeline security, and artifact management.
  • Web servers & proxies: deep knowledge of Nginx, Apache, Envoy, HAProxy, or similar for reverse proxying, caching, and TLS termination.
  • Networking & HTTP: TCP/IP, routing, load balancers, CDN concepts, HTTP/2, TLS, and web performance optimization.
  • Observability & logging: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry, and distributed tracing fundamentals.
  • Databases & caching: administration experience with PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and strategies for replication, sharding, and failover.
  • Scripting & programming: Python, Go, or Bash for automation, tool building, and integration work.
  • Security fundamentals: IAM, secrets management (Vault/KMS), WAF, vulnerability scanning, and secure configuration baselines.
  • Monitoring and incident management tools: PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or equivalent and proven incident handling practices.
  • Load testing and performance profiling tools: k6, JMeter, Locust, or equivalent.
  • Version control and collaboration: Git workflow expertise, branching strategies, and code review practices.
  • Backup, DR, and stateful recovery planning for web services and databases.

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication; able to document complex systems clearly for diverse audiences.
  • Cross-functional collaboration: works effectively with developers, product managers, QA, and security teams.
  • Analytical problem solving: root-cause analysis and evidence-driven decision making.
  • Prioritization and time management in high-pressure, incident-driven contexts.
  • Customer and uptime focus: takes ownership of production reliability and user experience.
  • Mentorship and knowledge transfer: helps junior engineers grow and fosters a culture of continuous improvement.
  • Adaptability to evolving tooling, processes, and business requirements.
  • Proactive mindset: identifies and removes operational friction before it becomes a problem.
  • Attention to detail when defining runbooks, playbooks, and configuration changes.
  • Ethical responsibility and respect for security and privacy practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent hands-on experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or Cloud Computing-related fields.
  • Professional certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or relevant cloud/SRE certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3 - 7 years of professional experience building, operating, or supporting web infrastructure, platform, or SRE functions.

Preferred: 5+ years with demonstrable experience in cloud-native architectures, container orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, production incident response, and infrastructure-as-code practices.

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