A Cloud Infrastructure Engineer is a professional who plays a critical role in designing, implementing, and managing the infrastructure required for cloud-based systems. They are responsible for ensuring the availability, scalability, and security of cloud platforms and services. In this blog post, we describe the primary responsibilities and the most in-demand hard and soft skills for Cloud Infrastructure Engineers.

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Main Responsibilities of a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

The following list describes the typical responsibilities of a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer:

Adhere to

Adhere to company PPE policies in restricted areas.

Administer

Administer multiple Azure accounts, their expenses and plan reservations accordingly.

Analyze

• Analyze, assess and recommend security controls for FedRAMP compliance.

• Analyze complex problems in the application space relating to resilience.

Architect

Architect next generation cloud platform utilizing public cloud, Kubernetes and containerization.

Assist in

• Assist DevOps teams with various implementations or platforms as necessary.

• Assist in AWS network and security design and implementation.

• Assist in the deployment and support of networking, security and various compute platforms.

• Assist to define and establish a hybrid cloud operating model.

Assume

Assume technical ownership.

Automate

• Automate deployments and configuration changes in Jenkins.

• Automate routine infrastructure management tasks.

Build

• Build a monitoring and alerting system for application performance.

• Build a world-class Cloud platform.

• Build infrastructure with security in mind.

• Build the virtual and security systems that support the cloud implementation.

Champion

• Champion best practices and standards for building, delivering, and operating reliable services.

• Champion Multi-tenant systems.

• Champion "Production Quality” and create cutting edge cloud infrastructure.

Collaborate with

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define infrastructure requirements.

• Collaborate with DevOps teams to streamline deployment processes.

• Collaborate with product management and business leadership to define platform strategy and roadmap.

• Collaborate with senior developers across the organization.

• Collaborate with software and infrastructure engineering teams to design solutions to enable them.

• Collaborate with vendors to evaluate and implement new cloud services.

Communicate

• Communicate clearly and are a pleasure to work with What You'll Do.

• Communicate clearly with colleagues and Team Leaders on any production related issues.

Conduct

• Conduct capacity planning and resource allocation for cloud resources.

• Conduct code reviews and testing.

• Conduct performance testing and load balancing for cloud applications.

• Conduct planning, cost analysis and vendor assessments for technologies.

• Conduct post-mortems to analyze failures and prevent recurrence.

• Conduct risk assessments for cloud infrastructure.

• Conduct security assessments and implement cloud security measures.

Configure

• Configure and deploy cloud services using automation and orchestration techniques.

• Configure and maintain backup, monitoring, and alerting systems for multiple customers.

• Configure, Support and Maintain variety of cloud platforms and technologies.

Contribute to

Contribute to tooling for automatic remediation of known problems.

Create

• Create and deliver best practices recommendations, tutorials, blog articles, and sample code.

• Create and maintain technical operation runbooks.

• Create cutting edge cloud infrastructure through Infrastructure-as-Code and automation.

• Create new tools to make everything better, faster, stronger.

• Create operational tooling for monitoring and self-healing infrastructures.

• Create visibility into database performance, and help with optimization.

Define

• Define and deploy systems for metrics, logging, and monitoring of AWS environments.

• Define and drive new technology introduction and adoption.

• Define and respond to alerts for a wide variety of applications and services.

Deploy

• Deploy and configure virtual machines and containers.

• Deploy code and configurations to IIS, troubleshoot configuration problems.

Design

• Design and build developer toolkit / tooling for Convene developers to streamline the process.

• Design and build net-new, production-grade environments for advanced analytical workloads.

• Design and implement public cloud infrastructure using Terraform, Packer, Consul and more.

• Design and implement SOP's that demonstrate best practices in action.

• Design and participate in a complex systems designs and implementations.

• Design cloud infrastructure architectures.

• Design documents, build books and run books.

Develop

• Develop and maintain disaster recovery procedures.

• Develop and refactor existing cloud infrastructure into target infrastructure.

• Develop best-practice recommendations.

• Develop infrastructure automation scripts and templates.

• Develop, maintain, and enforce SLI / SLO to ensure service and infrastructure availability.

• Develop policies and guidelines for the optimal architecture of applications in such environments.

• Develop SQL / MySQL queries.

• Develop the libraries, frameworks, and front-ends to support our highly-automated CI environments.

Document

• Document infrastructure configurations and processes.

• Document the design, operation and troubleshooting of technology platforms and procedures.

Drive

• Drive application teams to adopt cloud development and control methodologies.

• Drive operational excellence, quality, agility, and ever-increasing scale.

Engage

Engage on heavy hands-on work and cover a range of domain areas.

Ensure

• Ensure alignment to various compliance and risk management requirements.

• Ensure availability, performance, security, and scalability of our AWS environments.

• Ensure cloud systems are monitored and running efficiently.

• Ensure compliance with appropriate security standards.

• Ensure compliance with change control processes and adherence to compliance standards and policies.

• Ensure compliance with regulatory and governance policies.

• Ensure high availability and fault tolerance of cloud systems.

• Ensure ongoing alignment to industry best practices.

• Ensure security considerations are implemented, tested and maintained.

• Ensure SOP and infrastructure security are in compliance with ISO 27K / SOC.

• Ensure that monitoring is working properly and efficiently for all systems.

• Ensure top-tier security at all levels of the stack.

Establish

Establish and drive the evolution of the Cloud Infrastructure Engineering to maturity.

Evaluate

Evaluate new technologies and make recommendations on how to streamline or improve our systems.

Evangelize

Evangelize cloud development paradigm across infrastructure and applications.

Execute

Execute changes on production systems whenever necessary.

Handle

Handle seamless upgrades of infrastructure and services through automation.

Help

• Help build and scale a global Kubernetes infrastructure on bare-metal.

• Help guide architectural decisions and direct solutions that enhance our product reliability.

• Help maintain and scale the security and reliability of our infrastructure.

Identify

• Identify and implement optimal cloud-based solutions for our customers' Cloud Platforms.

• Identify, develop and implement tooling solutions to automate common tasks.

• Identify, gather, analyze and automate responses to key performance metrics, logs, and alerts.

• Identify opportunities to improve automation.

Implement

• Implement and maintain cloud computing environments.

• Implement and maintain monitoring and logging systems.

• Implement disaster recovery plans for cloud systems.

• Implement high-impact automation, replacing slow, error-prone manual processes.

• Implement network configurations for cloud environments.

Improve

• Improve scalability, observability, security and performance of infrastructure.

• Improve team wide visibility into application performance and bottlenecks.

Integrity

Integrity of the infrastructure and troubleshooting issues to ensure the stability of the service.

Interact with

Interact with customers on a regular basis.

Introduce

Introduce and enforce best practices for cloud service infrastructure.

Lead

• Lead and develop best practices for the larger overall cloud team.

• Lead and participate in technical discussions to aid system design, analysis, and troubleshooting.

• Lead innovation and strategic company and organizational initiatives.

• Lead technical projects and act as mentor to junior teammates.

Learn

Learn the ins and outs of supporting a platform running 24x7.

Made

Made use of middleware such as Apigee, Mulesoft.

Maintain

• Maintain and implement improvements to our software delivery infrastructure.

• Maintain platform security by following established security and data protection procedures.

• Maintain security, backup, and redundancy strategies.

Make

Make an impact at a global and dynamic investment organization.

Manage

• Manage and support Linux systems and Windows systems.

• Manage and support trading infrastructure operations.

• Manage cloud storage and data backup solutions.

• Manage, improve, and monitor cloud infrastructure on Amazon servicing clients from around the world.

• Manage ongoing programs delivering next generation architecture.

• Manage team's performance and interactions.

• Manage user access and permissions in cloud platforms.

Mentor

• Mentor junior members of the engineering team on the latest CICD technologies and best practices.

• Mentor other team members in various aspects of infrastructure technologies.

Monitor

• Monitor and optimize cloud infrastructure performance.

• Monitor and optimize costs.

• Monitor everything and make it self-healing.

• Monitor the performance and availability of deployed infrastructure.

Move

Move deployment to a continuous Infrastructure as Code model.

Offer

Offer ongoing support of the existing cloud based infrastructure.

Optimize

• Optimize cloud costs and recommend cost-saving strategies.

• Optimize network connectivity and performance.

Oversee

Oversee the delivery of services by partners and service providers.

Participate in

• Participate in architectural discussions, design and implementation of solutions.

• Participate in a shared on-call rotation.

• Participate in client-facing discussions.

• Participate in day-to-day infrastructure operations, technical guidance and support issue.

• Participate in infrastructure automation leveraging Terraform, Chef, Jenkin and Golang.

• Participate in the design of information and operational support systems.

Perform

• Perform regular system upgrades and patches.

• Perform root cause analysis for incidents and outages.

Plan

• Plan and perform migration of on prem workloads to AWS, including VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC).

• Plan AWS capacity, track and report health and performance on an ongoing basis.

Prioritise

Prioritise and deliver recommendations and improvements in response to incidents.

Provide

• Provide recommendation around technology evolution.

• Provide service support by participating in regular on-call shifts responding to service issues.

• Provide technical and architectural vision for one or more platform services.

• Provide technical guidance and support to other team members.

• Provide thought leadership, delivering best practice recommendations internally and externally.

Recommend

Recommend changes in line with developing technologies and the IT Strategy.

Research

• Research, evaluate and introduce best-in-class technologies to the team and our systems.

• Research new technologies and incorporate them into our service as necessary.

• Research, recommend and implement hybrid cloud orchestration and cloud cost optimization tool.

Respond to

• Respond to critical issues or other work outside of working hours as required.

• Respond to technical incidents in concert with other engineers.

Review

Review and triage test failures, reproduce and troubleshoot issues, verify fixes.

Scope

Scope and create automation for deployment, management, and visibility of our services.

Secure

Secure management of infrastructure.

Setup

Setup and configuration of AWS cloud infrastructure for new platform builds.

Stay up-to-date with

Stay up-to-date with industry trends and emerging cloud technologies.

Strengthen

Strengthen engineering process, principles, and culture within your team and across the organization.

Support

• Support code / system deployments and change management.

• Support continuous learning and professional development for yourself and your team.

• Support environment build out requests for Development and QA.

• Support for both Linux and Windows systems (basic system support).

• Support for platform updates and enhancements including testing and implementation.

• Support our solutions running on public cloud environments, including AWS.

• Support the deployment of cloud solution software during and off regular office hours.

• Support the program of continuous tactical enhancements and improvements to ITG infrastructure.

Take

Take part in an on-call rotation for critical events.

Test

Test and verify redundancy and recoverability at all levels.

Triage

Triage and resolve hardware and software issues as they arise.

Troubleshoot

• Troubleshoot and continuously monitor infra-level issues such as networking and access.

• Troubleshoot and resolve build, deployment, and configuration related issues.

• Troubleshoot and resolve infrastructure issues.

• Troubleshoot and resolve problems across various application domains and platforms.

Turn

Turn proof of concept architectures into production environments.

Use

• Use AWS to provide microservices architectures that are highly reliable, redundant and scalable.

• Use logs, metrics, automation tools, and more to take ownership of and improve uptime.

Work with

• Work across the organization to produce and roll out fixes.

• Work alongside developers and product owners to support new infrastructure and operational needs.

• Work autonomously with minimal supervision.

• Work closely with the members of the Convene Engineering team.

• Work directly with Engineering leaders to solve complex problems.

• Work with developers to test, debug and troubleshoot application issues and problems.

• Work with engineers to improve development, testing and deployment tooling and workflows.

• Work with our cloud infrastructure team to help.

• Work with product and business stakeholders to anticipate infrastructure needs.

• Work with product development teams to enhance and improve system operability.

• Work with Product Management to ensure we are forward-looking on computer and infrastructure needs.

• Work with teams as they migrate to and build new applications on your infrastructure.

Write

• Write and maintain tools and scripts to provide automation and self-service solutions.

• Write and review ansible and python scripts for automation.

Most In-demand Hard Skills

The following list describes the most required technical skills of a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer:

1. Proficiency in cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

2. Strong knowledge of infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.

3. Experience with containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.

4. Expertise in scripting languages like Python or Bash.

5. Familiarity with configuration management tools such as Ansible or Chef.

6. Knowledge of virtualization technologies like VMware or Hyper-V.

7. Understanding of networking concepts and protocols.

8. Proficiency in Linux and Windows operating systems.

9. Experience with database management systems like MySQL or PostgreSQL.

10. Knowledge of security principles and best practices for cloud environments.

11. Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools like Prometheus or ELK stack.

12. Understanding of load balancing and content delivery networks (CDNs).

13. Experience with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.

14. Knowledge of serverless computing concepts and platforms.

15. Expertise in data storage and backup technologies.

Most In-demand Soft Skills

The following list describes the most required soft skills of a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer:

1. Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.

2. Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

3. Ability to work effectively in a team environment.

4. Adaptability and willingness to learn new technologies.

5. Attention to detail and a strong focus on quality.

6. Time management and organizational skills.

7. Ability to work under pressure and meet deadlines.

8. Strong documentation and reporting skills.

9. Customer-centric mindset and focus on user satisfaction.

10. Proactive and self-motivated approach to work.

Conclusion

A Cloud Infrastructure Engineer plays a crucial role in designing, implementing, and managing the infrastructure for cloud-based systems. They possess a combination of technical expertise and essential soft skills to ensure the efficiency, security, and availability of cloud platforms and services. By acquiring the required hard and soft skills, individuals can position themselves as highly sought-after Cloud Infrastructure Engineers in today's competitive job market. With a deep understanding of cloud platforms, infrastructure automation, security protocols, and collaboration, these professionals are equipped to tackle the challenges of modern cloud environments.