Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Director of Infrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

The Director of Infrastructure is a senior engineering leader responsible for designing, operating, and scaling the company's infrastructure across cloud and on‑prem environments. This role owns infrastructure strategy, architecture, reliability, cost optimization, and operational excellence for compute, networking, storage, container platforms, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and disaster recovery. You will lead cross-functional teams (SRE, Cloud Engineers, Network, Platform) and partner with Security, Product, and Finance to deliver resilient, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure solutions that accelerate product delivery and business growth.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Infrastructure Manager / Head of Platform
Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or SRE Manager
Cloud Architect / Principal Cloud Engineer

Advancement To:

VP of Infrastructure / VP of Engineering (Infrastructure)
Head of Cloud / Head of Platform Engineering
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for infrastructure-heavy organizations

Lateral Moves:

Director of Cloud Operations
Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
Director of Platform Engineering

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Define and execute the multi-year infrastructure strategy and roadmap for hybrid cloud and on‑prem systems, aligning infrastructure investments to product priorities, security/compliance needs, and business outcomes.
Lead and mentor cross-functional infrastructure teams (SRE, cloud engineers, network, storage, platform) to design, deliver, and operate highly available, scalable systems that meet SLAs and SLOs.
Own architecture decisions for cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) and data center environments, including network topology, VPC design, inter-region connectivity, hybrid connectivity (VPN/Direct Connect), and transit architectures.
Architect, implement, and enforce Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or ARM templates to enable consistent, repeatable provisioning and change management.
Design and operate container platforms and orchestration (Kubernetes, EKS/AKS/GKE), ensuring secure multi-tenant clusters, cluster autoscaling, ingress, service mesh, and CI/CD integration for containerized applications.
Drive observability and telemetry strategy—implement centralized logging, distributed tracing, and metrics platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic) to enable proactive monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning.
Own reliability engineering practices: SLO/SLI definition, incident management, postmortem culture, blameless retrospectives, and continuous improvement into runbooks and automation.
Lead cloud cost management: rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, cost allocation, budgeting, chargeback/showback, and vendor negotiations to reduce spend while maintaining performance.
Establish and enforce infrastructure security and compliance controls—network segmentation, IAM policies, encryption, vulnerability remediation, logging, and adherence to regulatory standards (SOC2, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR).
Implement and mature CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and platform code, enabling safe, auditable, and automated deployments with gates, policy checks, and rollback mechanisms.
Define and manage capacity planning and forecasting processes to ensure compute, storage, and networking resources scale with business demand and product roadmaps.
Run vendor and partner relationships for hardware, cloud providers, MSPs, and managed services; negotiate contracts and SLAs to ensure cost and performance expectations.
Build and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans, including backup strategies, cross-region replication, failover testing, and recovery time objectives (RTO) / recovery point objectives (RPO).
Drive automation of operational tasks (runbook automation, self-healing, chatops) to reduce manual toil and improve MTTR for incidents.
Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to shape platform APIs, developer experience, onboarding processes, and platform-as-a-service offerings that accelerate developer productivity.
Oversee database infrastructure and platform services (managed databases, caching, message queues) to ensure performance, backup, and scalability practices are consistent with application needs.
Define infrastructure governance: tagging strategy, configuration baselines, policy-as-code, drift detection, and lifecycle management for ephemeral and persistent resources.
Lead security incident response for infrastructure-related breaches, coordinate cross-functional remediation, and drive long-term mitigation to reduce recurrence.
Create and track operational metrics, executive dashboards, KPIs (availability, MTTR, deployment frequency, lead time for changes), and regularly report to executive leadership on infrastructure health and risks.
Recruit, develop, and retain high-performing infrastructure talent; create career ladders, performance plans, and development programs to grow team capability.
Drive platform modernization initiatives such as migration to cloud-native services, serverless adoption where appropriate, and consolidation of legacy infrastructure to improve agility and reduce cost.

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.
Maintain and update runbooks, run regular DR/failover exercises, and document operational practices for on-call teams.
Facilitate cross-team architecture reviews, change advisory board (CAB) coordination, and release readiness checklists.
Provide executive-level summaries and risk assessments for major infrastructure changes, migrations, or incidents.
Serve as the escalation point for high-severity incidents and lead incident commander rotations as needed.
Coordinate third-party audits and compliance assessments related to infrastructure and cloud operations.
Promote platform adoption via training, internal docs, developer enablement, and platform roadshows.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Cloud Platforms: Extensive hands-on experience designing and operating AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud environments including core services (compute, networking, IAM, storage, DNS).
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficient with Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar, including modular design, state management, and CI integration.
Containerization & Orchestration: Deep knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), cluster architecture, operators, and multi-cluster strategies.
Observability & Monitoring: Practical experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK stacks, and distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin).
Networking & Security: Advanced networking (BGP, routing, VPNs, VPC/VNet design), firewalls, WAFs, load balancers, and network security best practices.
Automation & Scripting: Strong skills in Python, Go, Bash, or similar for automation, tooling, and build system integrations.
CI/CD & Release Engineering: Experience building pipelines with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or comparable platforms for infrastructure and app delivery.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Practices: SLO/SLI definition, error budgets, incident management, runbooks, and recovery orchestration.
Database & Storage Infrastructure: Knowledge of managed and self-hosted databases (Postgres, MySQL, Cassandra, Redis), backup strategies, and performance tuning.
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity: Designing RTO/RPO, cross-region replication, backups, and runbook-driven failover testing.
Cost Management & Cloud FinOps: Tools and practices for rightsizing, reserved instances, billing analysis, and cost optimization.
Compliance & Audit: Familiarity with SOC2, ISO, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR controls as they relate to infrastructure, logging, and documentation.
Architecture & Design: Systems architecture skills for building resilient, scalable, and observable platforms.
Vendor Management & Procurement: Experience negotiating with cloud providers, hardware vendors, and MSPs; managing SLAs and contracts.

Soft Skills

Leadership and people management: proven ability to build, mentor, and scale technical teams.
Strategic thinking: translate business objectives into technical roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
Communication: able to explain technical trade-offs to executives, partners, and engineers.
Collaboration: strong cross-functional partnership skills with Product, Security, Finance, and Legal.
Problem solving: pragmatic, data-driven approach to diagnosing and remediating complex outages and design issues.
Decision-making under pressure: calm incident commander with clear prioritization and escalation.
Coaching and talent development: invest in career growth, performance feedback, and hiring.
Stakeholder management: align competing priorities, manage expectations, and drive consensus.
Continuous improvement mindset: promotes automation, retrospectives, and process refinement.
Risk management: identify, quantify, and mitigate platform and operational risks.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, or related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or MBA (technical leadership emphasis).
Relevant certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP Professional, Kubernetes Certified, Certified Information Systems Security Professional CISSP, ITIL, Terraform Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Software Engineering
Information Systems / Cloud Computing
Network Engineering / Telecommunications
Systems Engineering / Electrical Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 10–15+ years in infrastructure, cloud, or operations roles with progressive leadership responsibility.

Preferred:

Minimum 5+ years managing multi-disciplinary infrastructure teams (managers, SREs, platform engineers).
Proven track record of operating production systems at scale (10Ks+ nodes or high-traffic, low-latency services).
Experience leading cloud migrations, platform modernization, or multi-region architecture initiatives.
Demonstrated success with budget ownership, vendor negotiations, and cost optimization at the organizational level.
Prior experience with regulatory compliance and third-party audits (SOC2, HIPAA, PCI) is highly desirable.

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