What Infrastructure Engineers Actually Do
The "Infrastructure Engineer" title is surprisingly ambiguous. At some companies, it means managing physical data centers; at others, it means architecting multi-region cloud deployments. Understanding what you actually need—and what candidates expect—is crucial for successful hiring.
A Day in the Life
Core Infrastructure Responsibilities
Compute Infrastructure
- Provisioning and managing servers (physical, virtual, or containerized)
- Capacity planning and scaling strategies
- Performance tuning and optimization
- Operating system configuration and hardening
Network Infrastructure
- Designing network architectures (VPCs, subnets, routing)
- Load balancer configuration and optimization
- DNS management and traffic routing
- Firewall rules and network security
- VPN and private connectivity solutions
Storage Infrastructure
- Block, object, and file storage solutions
- Backup and disaster recovery strategies
- Data replication and high availability
- Storage performance optimization
- Cost management across storage tiers
Cloud Infrastructure
- Multi-cloud or single-cloud architecture decisions
- Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)
- Cloud service selection and optimization
- Cost management and FinOps practices
- Compliance and governance
Infrastructure at Different Company Stages
At Startups (10-50 engineers)
Infrastructure is often one person doing everything:
- Setting up the initial cloud environment from scratch
- Making pragmatic decisions with limited budget
- Wearing multiple hats: infra, security, sometimes DevOps
- Building for the next 2x scale, not 100x
- Handling emergencies and learning from them
You need a generalist who can build working infrastructure quickly without over-engineering. They should be comfortable with ambiguity and able to prioritize what matters now versus what can wait.
At Scale-ups (50-200 engineers)
Infrastructure becomes a team with specialization:
- Dedicated network, storage, or cloud specialists
- Multi-region deployments and global infrastructure
- Cost optimization at scale ($50K-500K+ monthly cloud bills)
- Compliance requirements (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS)
- Infrastructure supporting multiple product teams
Here you need specialists who can go deep on specific domains. Network engineers, storage engineers, and cloud architects become distinct roles.
At Enterprises (200+ engineers)
Infrastructure fragments into highly specialized teams:
- Network Engineers — Dedicated to networking architecture
- Storage Engineers — Managing petabyte-scale storage systems
- Cloud Architects — Designing multi-cloud strategies
- Security Engineers — Infrastructure security and compliance
- Site Reliability Engineers — Reliability and operations
Infrastructure Engineer vs DevOps vs SRE vs Platform Engineering
These roles overlap significantly. Understanding the differences helps you write accurate job descriptions and find the right candidates.
Infrastructure Engineer
Focus: Foundational systems—compute, network, storage
Key metrics: Uptime, capacity utilization, cost efficiency
Typical work: Network architecture, cloud infrastructure, storage systems
Philosophy: "Build reliable foundations"
Background: Often systems administration, network engineering, or cloud operations
DevOps Engineer
Focus: Bridging development and operations, automation
Key metrics: Deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate
Typical work: CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, IaC
Philosophy: "Automate everything, enable developers"
Background: Often software development or systems administration
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Focus: Reliability through software engineering
Key metrics: SLOs, error budgets, incident response time
Typical work: On-call, incident management, reliability automation
Philosophy: "50% engineering, 50% operations" (Google model)
Background: Often software engineering with operations interest
Premium: SRE commands 10-15% higher salaries due to on-call burden
Platform Engineer
Focus: Internal developer platforms
Key metrics: Developer productivity, platform adoption
Typical work: Developer portals, self-service infrastructure, tooling
Philosophy: "Treat developers as customers"
Background: Often infrastructure or backend engineering with product interest
Which Title Should You Use?
| Your Need | Best Title |
|---|---|
| Build core cloud/network/storage infrastructure | Infrastructure Engineer |
| Automate deployments, improve CI/CD | DevOps Engineer |
| Improve reliability, handle on-call | SRE |
| Build internal developer tools and platforms | Platform Engineer |
| Need someone to do all of the above (startup) | Infrastructure Engineer or DevOps Engineer |
Many candidates have experience across these roles. Don't filter out strong candidates because their last title was "DevOps" when you're looking for "Infrastructure."
Where to Find Infrastructure Engineers
Infrastructure Engineers tend to congregate in different communities than application developers:
Technical Communities
- daily.dev — Infrastructure and cloud content is popular among ops-minded engineers
- CNCF Slack channels — Active Kubernetes and cloud-native community
- Reddit — r/sysadmin, r/devops, r/aws, r/networking
- HashiCorp User Groups — Terraform, Vault, Consul practitioners
- Meetups — AWS User Groups, Kubernetes meetups, local DevOps groups
Conference Circuits
- AWS re:Invent — Massive AWS-focused event
- KubeCon/CloudNativeCon — Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystem
- DevOpsDays — Regional DevOps conferences
- HashiConf — HashiCorp product users
- VMware Explore — Enterprise infrastructure
Sourcing Signals
Look for engineers with:
- GitHub activity around infrastructure tools (Terraform modules, Ansible playbooks, network automation)
- Blog posts about production infrastructure challenges and solutions
- Certifications combined with real experience (not just certification collectors)
- Open source contributions to infrastructure projects
- Speaking at DevOps or infrastructure conferences
Where They're Hiding
- Cloud consultancies — AWS Partners, GCP Partners, HashiCorp Partners
- Companies with mature infrastructure — Datadog, Cloudflare, Netflix alumni
- Managed service providers — Engineers who've seen dozens of environments
- Telecommunications companies — Deep networking expertise
- Financial services — Engineers who understand compliance and reliability
- Gaming companies — Engineers who've handled massive scale
What Infrastructure Engineers Look For in Jobs
Technical Environment
- Modern tooling: Terraform over ClickOps, automation over manual work
- Cloud exposure: Opportunity to work with modern cloud services
- Scale challenges: Interesting infrastructure problems to solve
- Learning opportunities: Exposure to new technologies and patterns
Work Environment
- Reasonable on-call: If on-call exists, it should be compensated and sustainable
- Autonomy: Freedom to make infrastructure decisions
- Impact visibility: Connection between their work and business outcomes
- Career growth: Path to senior, staff, or management roles
What Breaks Trust
- "We're moving to the cloud" (when they're not really)
- Unrealistic on-call expectations without compensation
- Legacy infrastructure with no modernization plan
- No budget for tooling or infrastructure improvements
- Being treated as "the ops person" rather than an engineer
Skills Progression: Junior to Staff
Career Progression
Curiosity & fundamentals
Independence & ownership
Architecture & leadership
Strategy & org impact
Understanding the Infrastructure Engineer career ladder helps you hire the right level:
Junior Infrastructure Engineer (0-2 years)
- Executes infrastructure tasks following documented procedures
- Manages basic cloud resources with guidance
- Troubleshoots common infrastructure issues
- Learns infrastructure as code patterns
- Needs mentorship on architecture decisions
Mid-Level Infrastructure Engineer (2-5 years)
- Designs and implements infrastructure components independently
- Writes production-quality Terraform/Pulumi modules
- Handles complex troubleshooting and optimization
- Understands networking, storage, and compute tradeoffs
- Can mentor junior engineers on technical topics
Senior Infrastructure Engineer (5-8 years)
- Architects infrastructure for reliability, scale, and cost
- Makes build vs. buy decisions for infrastructure components
- Leads infrastructure projects across multiple teams
- Defines standards and best practices
- Influences technical direction beyond their immediate team
Staff/Principal Infrastructure Engineer (8+ years)
- Sets infrastructure strategy for the organization
- Evaluates and drives adoption of new technologies
- Builds relationships with cloud vendors and partners
- Mentors across the infrastructure organization
- Balances technical depth with organizational impact
Technical Terms Recruiters Should Know
| Term | What It Means |
|---|---|
| IaC | Infrastructure as Code—managing infrastructure through code files (Terraform, Pulumi) |
| VPC | Virtual Private Cloud—isolated network environment in cloud providers |
| Load Balancer | Distributes traffic across multiple servers for reliability and performance |
| CDN | Content Delivery Network—caches content globally for faster access |
| DNS | Domain Name System—translates domain names to IP addresses |
| Subnet | A subdivision of a network, used for organization and security |
| CIDR | Classless Inter-Domain Routing—notation for specifying IP address ranges |
| NAT | Network Address Translation—allows private network resources to access internet |
| Ingress/Egress | Network traffic flowing in (ingress) or out (egress) |
| S3 | Amazon's object storage service (similar: GCS for Google, Azure Blob) |
| EC2 | Amazon's virtual server service (similar: Compute Engine, Azure VMs) |
| RDS | Amazon's managed database service |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network—secure connection between networks |
| HA | High Availability—systems designed to minimize downtime |
| DR | Disaster Recovery—plans and systems for recovering from major failures |
| FinOps | Financial Operations—optimizing cloud spending |
Developer Expectations
| Aspect | ✓ What They Expect | ✗ What Breaks Trust |
|---|---|---|
| Tooling | →Modern IaC (Terraform, Pulumi), cloud-native services, GitOps workflows | ⚠ClickOps, manual provisioning, undocumented snowflake servers |
| On-call | →Fair compensation, shared rotation, good runbooks and monitoring | ⚠Infrastructure team carries all on-call alone, no compensation, blame culture |
| Autonomy | →Freedom to make architecture decisions, evaluate new tools, drive improvements | ⚠"We've always done it this way" resistance to change, micromanagement |
| Growth Path | →Clear progression to senior, staff, or management; exposure to new technologies | ⚠"Infrastructure is just infrastructure"—no career growth or learning opportunities |
| Impact | →Connection between infrastructure work and business outcomes, recognition for reliability | ⚠Only noticed when things break, invisible when things work |