Infrastructure Engineer

Overview

Design and implement cloud infrastructure. This skill covers IaC (Terraform, Pulumi), CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration (Kubernetes), networking, observability, and security hardening.

Features

• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform modules, Pulumi stacks, state management, drift detection
• CI/CD pipelines: pipeline essentials, deployment strategies, environment promotion, rollback procedures
• Container orchestration: Kubernetes architecture, Helm charts, service mesh, autoscaling
• Networking: VPC design, load balancers, DNS, CDN, private endpoints
• Observability: metrics, logs, traces, alerting, dashboards
• Security hardening: IAM policies, encryption, network security, compliance controls

Usage

1. Identify the user's infrastructure need (IaC, CI/CD, Kubernetes, networking, observability, or security)
2. Follow the corresponding workflow below
3. Produce structured outputs: Terraform configs, pipeline definitions, Kubernetes manifests, or architecture diagrams

Examples

• User: "Set up Terraform for AWS"

Agent: Runs IaC workflow, creates module structure, configures state backend, produces VPC, EC2, and RDS resources

• User: "Build a CI/CD pipeline"

Agent: Runs CI/CD workflow, designs pipeline with build/test/deploy stages, adds environment promotion and rollback

• User: "Configure Kubernetes autoscaling"

Agent: Runs Kubernetes workflow, sets up HPA based on CPU/memory, configures cluster autoscaler, tests scaling behavior

When to Use

• Designing cloud or hybrid networks, compute, storage, and IAM patterns
• Building CI/CD, GitOps, Kubernetes, or IaC (Terraform/Pulumi/CloudFormation)
• Implementing observability, SRE practices, and infrastructure incident response
• Hardening infrastructure for security and compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc.)

For security-control ownership (IdP, KMS, SIEM integration, PAM, guardrails as primary deliverable), prefer information-security-engineer.

For authorized network/AD/segmentation pentest validation (not IaC design), prefer network-pentester.

For internal developer platform, golden paths, Backstage/catalog, and platform-as-product work, prefer platform-engineer.

When NOT to Use

• Data warehouse modeling, ETL, or analytics pipeline SLAs → use data-warehouse-engineer or data-system-ops-lead
• Data governance catalogs, quality SLAs, or steward workflows → use data-architect or data-manager
• LLM prompt/agent design or production guardrails → use prompt-engineer
• Technical documentation or research synthesis deliverables → use tech-writer-researcher
• Cross-service solution architecture before build → use senior-system-architecture
• Cloud reference architecture, landing zone, migration design → use cloud-architect
• Day-to-day managed cloud services (networking, RDS, serverless, cloud IAM) → use cloud-engineer
• K8s cluster workload deploy, upgrades, and in-cluster troubleshooting → use cluster-deployment-engineer
• Data center design, MEP, colo build, and facility commissioning → use data-center-design-execution-lead
• Physical compute utilization, supply forecast, consolidation, refresh → use data-center-compute-supply-efficiency
• Infrastructure org strategy, portfolio prioritization, board/CFO narratives → use vp-of-infrastructure
• Cloud program strategy, migration portfolio, CCoE, EA governance → use vp-of-cloud
• Customer RFP, discovery, PoC charter, solution handoff (not production build) → use solutions-architect

Core Workflows

1. Infrastructure Design & Provisioning

Design checklist:

1. Define requirements

- Traffic patterns (steady, bursty, batch) - Compliance needs (data residency, encryption) - RTO/RPO targets - Budget constraints

1. Choose compute model

1. Design network

- VPC/VNet with public/private subnets - NAT Gateway for outbound-only workloads - Transit Gateway for multi-VPC/VNet - PrivateLink/Private Service Connect for SaaS

1. Provision with IaC

- Terraform for multi-cloud - CloudFormation for AWS-only - Pulumi for programmatic (Python/TS) - Ansible for configuration management

2. CI/CD & Platform Automation

Pipeline essentials:

• Build → Test → Security scan → Deploy → Verify
• GitOps with ArgoCD/Flux for K8s
• Feature flags for progressive rollout
• Automated rollback on failure

3. Monitoring & Reliability

Observability stack:

• Metrics: Prometheus + Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch
• Logs: ELK, Loki, Splunk
• Traces: Jaeger, Zipkin, AWS X-Ray
• Alerts: PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Alertmanager

Reliability patterns:

• Health checks: liveness, readiness, startup probes
• Circuit breakers: fail fast, degrade gracefully
• Rate limiting: token bucket, leaky bucket
• Bulkheads: isolate failure domains

4. Security & Compliance

Security by layer:

• Network: Security groups, NACLs, WAF, DDoS protection
• Identity: RBAC, least privilege, MFA, service accounts
• Data: Encryption at rest (KMS) and in transit (TLS 1.3)
• Application: Secrets management, vulnerability scanning
• Compliance: SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA controls