Infrastructure Engineer
Infrastructure Engineers are responsible for designing, building, deploying, evaluating, and maintaining IT infrastructure using the latest technology and ensuring all IT systems that support businesses of any size function efficiently and seamlessly. Infrastructure Engineers are also known as IT Infrastructure Engineers, Network Infrastructure Engineers, or Change Managers.
Infrastructure Engineer Job Description
The infrastructure engineer role includes being responsible for performing several duties for their overall objective of maintaining the infrastructure of an organization. Their responsibilities include:
- Designing and improving projects for implementation.
- Assessing current systems to secure best practices and balance by complying with federal policies and procedures.
- Managing broad area virtual private networks (VPNs), fixing network and connectivity issues, and ensuring sufficient network redundancy to satellites and warehouses.
- Understanding system administration and how network hardware and technologies work.
- Administering automated workflow tools, middleware application servers (i.e., Oracle Weblogic, IBM WebSphere), and server visualization technologies (i.e., VMware, Red Hat Virtualization, or Oracle VM).
- Monitoring operating system performance (i.e., Windows, Linux, or Mac OS).
- Troubleshooting applications and providing J2EE application deployment. They partner with the application development team to build, implement, and troubleshoot applications.
- Optimizing performance of databases, networks, applications, and servers.
- Serving as configuration managers to create, apply, and enforce processes for promoting all infrastructure components from the development environment to the testing, demonstrating, and generating environments.
- Installing components on networks and servers and ensuring they work in tandem and can be executed without compilation errors in various platforms and environments.
- Managing the host environment to ensure proper tuning and sufficient capacity (including web servers, database servers, VMWare, Cisco, Citrix, SAN, directories, and blades).
- Sharing knowledge across organizations and participating in client projects (e.g., position papers, special studies, evaluations, etc.).
- Integrating and leading programs across organizations.
- Ensuring the smooth flow of data throughout an organization, including resolving desktop computer and phone (video conferencing) issues.
- Managing the security of computer systems and inter-application information transfers.
Infrastructure Engineer Employment Prospects
Employment growth for infrastructure engineers looks promising as technologies, such as cloud computing, telecommunications, financial and data transactions, and cyber security, continue to grow and advance.
The US Data of Labor Statistics (BLS) says that job opportunities for infrastructure engineers are estimated to grow 5% between 2020 and 2030. The demand for infrastructure engineers has been exponentially increasing, especially within the telecom industry. As a result, telecom and many other industries in need of engineers are embracing the future of an on-demand workforce. Infrastructure engineers have the flexibility to work remotely or onsite, and since global connections are predicted to reach 3.5 billion by 2023, the demand for remote engineers will increase as businesses continue to prioritize globalization.
Infrastructure Engineer Salary
The average annual base salary for an infrastructure engineer in the US is between $79,480 (Payscale) and $115,606 (ZipRecruiter). Freelancing can also be a more profitable and flexible option.
Infrastructure Engineer Education Requirements
Most infrastructure engineers entering the job market need a bachelor’s degree in a computer science or information technology field. Since the skill sets of infrastructure engineers are complex, a four-year bachelor’s degree is usually not sufficient. The certifications infrastructure engineers require will generally depend on employers, and the most common certifications include MCITP, CCNP and VCP.
In addition, an IT infrastructure engineer should be knowledgeable about network and security concepts, different server technologies, SAN technology, virtualization technologies, system/application tuning techniques and system performance optimization. Infrastructure engineers should also have excellent written and verbal communication skills since they will often need to explain technical information to individuals from non-technical backgrounds.
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