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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Global Engineer

💰 $120,000 - $190,000

EngineeringInfrastructureCloud ComputingIT OperationsDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

As a Global Engineer, you are the architect and guardian of our worldwide technology infrastructure. This role involves designing, building, and maintaining the robust, scalable, and secure systems that power our international operations. You will be a key technical leader, working across time zones with diverse teams to ensure our services are performant, reliable, and always available to our global user base. This position requires a deep technical expertise in cloud and on-premise environments, a passion for automation, and a strategic mindset to support the company's long-term growth and expansion.


📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Systems Engineer / Administrator
  • Cloud Engineer / DevOps Engineer
  • Senior Network Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Principal Global Engineer / Infrastructure Architect
  • Director of Global Infrastructure & Operations
  • Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Security Architect
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Lead
  • Solutions Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, implement, and manage a highly available and scalable global infrastructure, leveraging a hybrid model of public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and on-premise data centers.
  • Develop and maintain comprehensive Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Ansible to automate the provisioning and configuration of all environments.
  • Architect and manage global networking solutions, including WAN/LAN, VPNs, SD-WAN, and direct connects, ensuring low latency and high-throughput connectivity between regions.
  • Lead the strategy and execution of global disaster recovery and business continuity plans, conducting regular drills and ensuring RTO/RPO objectives are met.
  • Implement and manage robust CI/CD pipelines to facilitate rapid, reliable, and automated deployment of applications and infrastructure changes across the globe.
  • Establish and oversee a comprehensive global monitoring, logging, and alerting framework using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Splunk to ensure proactive issue detection and resolution.
  • Drive performance tuning and cost optimization initiatives across our global cloud footprint, providing regular analysis and recommendations to leadership.
  • Act as a top-tier escalation point for complex, mission-critical infrastructure incidents, leading troubleshooting efforts that may span multiple teams and time zones.
  • Engineer and maintain container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE) to support scalable, resilient microservices architectures.
  • Collaborate with cybersecurity teams to implement and enforce security best practices, policies, and compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001) across the global estate.
  • Manage the full lifecycle of physical and virtual servers, storage, and networking hardware within our international data centers.
  • Conduct in-depth capacity planning and forecasting to ensure our infrastructure can support future business growth and product launches.
  • Evaluate emerging technologies, industry trends, and open-source projects to propose and spearhead innovation and continuous improvement of the global infrastructure.
  • Develop detailed architectural diagrams, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and technical documentation to support global operations and knowledge sharing.
  • Lead complex infrastructure migration projects, such as data center consolidations, cloud migrations, or platform upgrades, with minimal impact to global services.

Secondary Functions

  • Mentor junior engineers and provide technical guidance and subject matter expertise to cross-functional teams across different geographic locations.
  • Manage relationships and negotiations with global technology vendors, service providers, and data center partners.
  • Participate in a global on-call rotation to provide 24/7 support for critical infrastructure incidents.
  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis related to infrastructure performance and cost.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap by ensuring the underlying infrastructure can support data-intensive workloads.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs and application requirements into robust and scalable engineering solutions.
  • Participate in sprint planning, retrospectives, and other agile ceremonies within the global engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platform Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including core IaaS and PaaS services.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Advanced proficiency with tools like Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, or AWS CloudFormation for automating infrastructure deployment.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Strong command of Docker and Kubernetes (K8s), including cluster management, networking (e.g., CNI), and security.
  • CI/CD & Automation: Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or Azure DevOps.
  • Scripting & Programming: Proficiency in scripting languages like Python, Bash, or PowerShell for automation and systems administration.
  • Global Network Architecture: Solid understanding of networking principles and protocols including TCP/IP, BGP, MPLS, DNS, and experience with SD-WAN solutions.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Expertise in using monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or Splunk to build dashboards, alerts, and trace distributed systems.
  • Operating Systems: In-depth knowledge of Linux administration (e.g., RHEL, Ubuntu) and a working knowledge of Windows Server.

Soft Skills

  • Cross-Cultural Communication: Excellent ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences across different cultures and time zones.
  • Strategic Problem-Solving: Ability to analyze complex, large-scale problems, identify root causes, and implement resilient, long-term solutions in a distributed environment.
  • Project Leadership: Proven experience leading technical projects from conception to completion, managing timelines, and coordinating with multiple stakeholders.
  • Adaptability & Resilience: Thrives in a fast-paced, 24/7 global environment and can remain calm and effective under pressure during critical incidents.
  • Stakeholder Management: Skill in building relationships and collaborating with developers, product managers, and business leaders to achieve common goals.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's Degree in a relevant field or equivalent demonstrated practical experience in a large-scale enterprise environment.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline.
  • Professional certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 7-10+ years of progressive experience in Systems Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or DevOps roles.

Preferred:

  • A minimum of 4 years of specific experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, geographically distributed infrastructure in a public cloud environment.
  • Demonstrated experience leading international technical projects and acting as a technical authority for a global system or platform.