IT Infrastructure Manager – Job Description
Overview
The IT Infrastructure Manager is responsible for leading and managing the company’s infrastructure function across data center, cloud (Azure), network, storage, and compute environments. This role owns the reliability, scalability, and operational maturity of infrastructure platforms while directly managing and developing a team of infrastructure engineers and administrators.
The IT Infrastructure Manager balances people leadership, operational accountability, and technical direction, ensuring infrastructure services meet business needs while supporting modernization and cloud adoption initiatives. While remaining technically fluent, this role focuses on setting standards, prioritizing work, and guiding execution.
In addition, the IT Infrastructure Manager plays a forward-looking role in identifying opportunities for automation and AI enablement within IT operations and business processes. This role ensures infrastructure platforms are ready to support these capabilities and helps leadership evaluate potential use cases, without owning enterprise AI strategy or solution development.
Key Responsibilities
Infrastructure Strategy & Platform Ownership
- Own the overall infrastructure roadmap, aligning data center, cloud (Azure), network, storage, and compute platforms with business and IT strategy.
- Guide the evolution from hybrid infrastructure toward increased cloud adoption, standardization, and operational efficiency.
- Establish and enforce infrastructure standards for availability, performance, monitoring, backup, and disaster recovery.
- Ensure infrastructure platforms are scalable, resilient, and cost-effective.
Operations Management & Reliability
- Accountable for day-to-day infrastructure stability, availability, and incident resolution outcomes.
- Oversee infrastructure lifecycle management, including capacity planning, patching, upgrades, hardware refreshes, and cloud optimization.
- Act as the management escalation point for major incidents and systemic issues, coordinating across IT teams and vendors.
- Ensure runbooks, operational documentation, and technical standards are current and consistently followed.
People Leadership & Team Development
- Directly manage a team of infrastructure engineers and administrators.
- Set clear expectations, priorities, and performance objectives for the infrastructure team.
- Coach and develop staff through regular one-on-ones, feedback, and skills development plans.
- Identify skill gaps and contribute to hiring, workforce planning, and succession planning.
- Foster a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and shared ownership.
Automation & AI Enablement
- Identify opportunities for automation and orchestration within infrastructure operations to improve efficiency and reliability.
- Ensure infrastructure platforms are capable of supporting AI-enabled tools and services.
- Partner with IT leadership to evaluate early AI and automation use cases such as predictive monitoring or service optimization.
- Prioritize automation initiatives based on operational impact and business value.
Security, Risk & Compliance Alignment
- Partner with the Security team to ensure infrastructure designs and configurations align with zero-trust principles and risk management objectives.
- Ensure infrastructure platforms support vulnerability remediation, segmentation, logging, and security monitoring requirements.
- Participate in risk assessments and remediation planning related to infrastructure services.
Vendor & Stakeholder Management
- Manage relationships with infrastructure vendors, cloud providers, and managed service partners.
- Ensure vendor performance aligns with SLAs, security requirements, and cost expectations.
- Collaborate with IT Support, Application Support, Security, and Business Systems teams to deliver reliable end-to-end services.
- Communicate infrastructure health, risks, and roadmap progress to IT leadership.
Skills & Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field; equivalent experience considered.
- 4–8 years of progressive infrastructure experience across cloud, data center, and network environments.
- 2+ years in an infrastructure leadership or people management role.
- Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Azure, virtualization platforms, and Windows/Linux server environments.
- Solid understanding of networking fundamentals including routing, switching, firewalls, VPN, and SD-WAN.
- Familiarity with endpoint management, asset visibility, or configuration management platforms such as Tanium.
- Familiarity with infrastructure automation and scripting concepts.
- Experience with monitoring, observability, and incident management practices.
- Experience with disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
Reporting & Collaboration
- Reports to the Head of IT Operations
- Manages Infrastructure Engineers and Administrators
- Works closely with IT Support Manager, Application Support, Security team, cloud partners, and external vendors
- Infrastructure Design & Engineering
- Leads the design and implementation of hybrid cloud infrastructure with an emphasis on Azure adoption, automation, and modernization.
- Architects solutions across computing, storage, and network domains, ensuring scalability and disaster recovery readiness.
- Defines standards for monitoring, performance, and configuration management.
AI & Automation Readiness
- Identifies opportunities for AI and automation within IT and business operations (e.g., help desk automation, predictive maintenance, workflow optimization).
- Ensures infrastructure platforms (Azure, M365, data integrations) are capable of supporting AI tools and services.
- Partners with leadership on early AI use case evaluations and proof-of-concepts, while leaving ownership of enterprise AI strategy to future dedicated roles.
Operations Leadership
- Provides Tier-3/architect-level support for escalations from Infrastructure Engineers, Service Desk, and Applications teams.
- Oversees infrastructure lifecycle (capacity planning, patching, hardware refresh, cloud optimization).
- Owns infrastructure documentation, runbooks, and technical standards.
- Automation & Cloud Enablement
- Drives adoption of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for deployments and guardrails.
- Leads automation efforts for provisioning, monitoring, and backup/restore processes.
- Partners with DevOps/CloudOps on pipelines and secure cloud adoption.
Security & Compliance Alignment
- Collaborates with Security team to enforce zero-trust principles, network segmentation, and vulnerability remediation.
- Using consolidated strategy and risk from leadership, identify platforms and configurations that secure systems.
- Ensures infrastructure controls support compliance frameworks where appropriate.
Team Mentorship & Leadership
- Provides technical leadership and mentorship to a small team of infrastructure engineers/administrators.
- Performs as a thought leader in infrastructure design, helping less experienced staff build skills.
- Contributes to workforce planning and skill development but without formal people-management overhead.
Education & Essential Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree and at least 8 years of progressive infrastructure experience OR a High School Diploma / GED and at least 11 years of progressive infrastructure experience
- Experience working with Microsoft Azure, virtualization (vSphere), and Windows/Linux server environments.
- Experience working with networking (routing, switching, firewalls, VPN, SD-WAN).
- Experience (hands-on) with infrastructure automation tools (Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell DSC).
- Knowledge of monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., SolarWinds, Azure Monitor, Splunk).
- Experience in DR/BCP planning and execution.
- Experience in engineering
- At least 2 years in an IT infrastructure leadership role.
Crystal Clean LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Crystal Clean expressly values diversity, equity, and inclusion, and encourages the applications of individuals from diverse backgrounds, so that Crystal Clean reflects the communities and customers that we serve.
The anticipated salary range for this position is $150,000 - $165,000, and includes benefits such as the following:
- Health, Dental and Vision insurance
- Wellness Program
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Life Insurance
- Long-Term Disability
- Employee Assistance Program
- Tuition Reimbursement
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, IT, or related field
- Technical certifications, such as MCSE, Azure Solutions Architect, CCNP, VMware VCP
