infrastructure engineer Career Path | See the Career Paths People Really Take

support engineer

devops engineer

software development intern

consultant

product manager

systems engineer

senior devops engineer

software engineer

software engineering intern

strategy manager

The Consultant is an expert in matters concerning their field, and provides advice to improve business practices.  Their role is identifying the cause of problems, and presenting their solutions in a comprehensive and detailed manner.  Their responsibilities are to undertake short-term and long-term projects to address a variety of issues and needs, meet with management or appropriate staff to understand their requirements, conduct situational and data analysis to identify and understand a problem or issue, present and explain findings to executives, provide advice or suggestions for improvement according to objectives, and formulate plans to implement recommendations and overcome objections.

Discover the role of an independent consultant working remotely on large-scale development projects. Learn about daily responsibilities, the importance of self-motivation, and balancing challenging tasks to build work life balance.

<h2>My Role</h2><p>I am an independent consultant, and currently, I'm working as a project manager on two different types of projects. One is a big development project, 1800 units in Davis, California.&nbsp;</p><h2><br></h2><h2>Job Responsibilities</h2><p>I manage all aspects of the project, coordinating with consultants, the city, and the owners.</p><p>Typically, I'll have Zoom calls in the morning because I work remotely most of the time now. I'll have multiple Zoom calls with the city, the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) consultant, or with the builder and the clients. I make a lot of phone calls and communicate with people to make sure things are progressing, following up to ensure tasks are on track or initiating new ones as needed. I also put together documentation to support other aspects of the project.</p><p>My role involves ensuring that everything is done correctly and meets the legal requirements as well as the city's ordinances. A key part for me has always been knowing when to bring in the right people with the expertise and using their knowledge to advance the project. I enjoy collaborating with different entities and seeing everything come together, regardless of the project's size.</p><h2><br></h2><h2>Important Job Skills</h2><p>I recommend getting into this role if you're independently motivated and a self-starter. Being self-motivated allows you to create opportunities for yourself. You don't necessarily have to work independently, but even within a larger group, you need to take ownership. Don't wait for directions; be proactive and anticipate needs.</p><h2><br></h2><h2>Career Advice</h2><p>You have to love what you do. If you love your work, it doesn't feel like a grind. But sometimes, you will have to grind. You might get projects or assignments you don’t love, but completing those tasks builds experience and can lead to opportunities you do enjoy. The challenging projects come back to benefit you in the future.</p><p><br></p>

Devops Engineer combines software development and IT operations with the goal of shortening the development life cycle of high quality software, and providing continuous delivery. In this role, they deploy software, manage and develop continuous integration/continuous deployment (CICD), manage servers, supervise junior developers, develop software and configure systems, and perform diagnostic tests throughout development. Devops engineers also actively troubleshoot issues that arise during testing and production to catch, and solve problems before launch.

An Infrastructure Engineer is a unique position that has evolved as the Internet has become mainstream. An Infrastructure Engineer is responsible for designing, coordinating and maintaining the infrastructure of an apartment complex, public facility or entire cities.

infrastructure engineer

A Product Manager is tasked with supervising the development and improvement of company products.  Their role is understanding and researching customer experiences and demands, outlining a detailed product strategy, and managing cross-functional teams.  Their responsibilities are understanding product selling points, identifying and filling product gaps, developing product pricing and positioning strategies, creating new product ideas, acting as a product evangelist, representing the company at public events, determining feature requirements, and working with PR and marketing teams to manage product launches.

Product managers design solutions. You don't have to have a special background or degree to get into this field - but you do need to enjoy thinking analytically and solving problems. Learn more about product management and tips on how to get started.

<h2>Product Managers</h2><p>Product managers don't build products. They help design solutions based off of problems that they've discovered.</p><p><br></p><h2>Product Management Skills</h2><p>You need to be good at solving problems and thinking analytically. That's probably one of the most important skills you need to have. But it's not like you need an engineering degree or you need a math degree. And one of the other important things is to be able to lead and communicate well because this is a job of influence. You're talking to lots of people, from the CEO to customer support to your customers. And you have to be able to talk with them on a one-on-one basis and switch context really easily. Another big requirement is just understanding how software is built. And you don't have to be a computer science major, but you have to have a passion for realizing that software is a series of programs or steps that accomplishes a task. And understanding what those steps are is really important so you can help guide in the development of software.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><h2>Common Pathways to Product Management</h2><p>There's folks that come into the job from lots of different backgrounds. About 80% of people come through one of two paths. Either they were some sort of engineer by training, or they had some sort of business background by training. Another large segment of people study this concept called human-computer interaction, which is what product managers are doing. They're trying to understand how can humans interact with computers and technology in their everyday life.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><h2>Tips to Get Into Product Management</h2><p>There's no real training. Anybody can do it. You just have to want to think analytically and solve other people's problems.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>Just starting to network and join tech communities. You could do that online or you could do that in person. And then start working on a project of your own. Look at a simple webpage to make. Look at doing an internship for free online, working for a company five hours a week, designing an email for them. Do something simple. A simple place where you can deliver a product or an experience and measure success.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>It's also really important to know that in this job, data is important, but you've really gotta go on your gut and try to be creative. So it's a combination of what the data tells you, but also what your get tells you about how you can solve a problem for your customers.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>One of the things that's really important about this space is learning about all the new technologies that other people are developing. And so I spend about an hour a day reading about new technologies that are coming out and thinking about, huh, that's a cool thing I could do for my customers. Maybe I can bring that technology into my company and help my customers do something a little bit easier than they were doing in the past.</p><p><br></p>

Also known as Senior Developers, Senior DevOps Engineers oversee teams of junior software developers. Their duties include advising on the alignment of operations with information systems, writing code and scripts, and ensuring the seamless deployment of software.

A Software Development Intern is a temporary position that provides students and recent graduates with an opportunity to gain hands-on experience in software development. The intern will work closely with experienced developers and have the chance to apply theoretical knowledge in a professional setting. The main responsibilities of this role include developing new applications, debugging existing code, creating technical documentation, writing automated tests, and delivering solutions according to project timelines. To be successful in this role, the candidate must possess strong problem-solving skills and demonstrate proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, C++, Python or JavaScript. Additionally they should be able to work independently as well as collaboratively within a team environment.

A software engineer is a professional who applies the principles of engineering to the design, development, maintenance, testing, and evaluation of computer software. Responsibilities of a software engineer include gathering requirements, defining system functionality, designing systems software, websites, and applications, and writing code in various computer programming languages.

Learn about being a Software Engineer from someone with 25 years of experience. He shares that not everyone needs a degree in Computer Science, but it is the most common path. If you enjoy technology and breaking down problems, this might be the path for you.

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<h2 dir="ltr">Engineering Career:</h2>
<p dir="ltr">I spent 25 years being a software engineer, mostly on the server side. I was working with APIs, backend development databases, SQL.</p>
<h2 dir="ltr">Software Engineer Requirements:</h2>
<p dir="ltr">Most people are expected to have a computer science degree. It's not 100% true. Some of the best engineers do come in with a different type of degree. But more often than not, people are expected to have gone to college and work in computer science.</p>
<h2 dir="ltr">Career Skills:</h2>
<p dir="ltr">I feel like people need to have both strong communication skills and also a good amount of humility, because we all have pros and cons. We all have things that we're good at. We have things that we're not the best at, but maybe there's somebody else on the team to do a better job. So the better that you are at knowing what your strengths and limitations are, the better it's going to be for the team. The ones who really want to improve their skills will seek out people who are better than they are and learn from them.</p>
<h2 dir="ltr">Career Tip:</h2>
<p dir="ltr">Make sure that you enjoy breaking problems down, implementing the behavior of the system and code, talking to other people about technology, about pros and cons, all those kinds of things. It's going to help you be a much more successful software engineer.</p>

A software engineering intern (also called a software developer intern, computer programmer intern, a programmer intern) is a person who works in a temporary position with an emphasis on on-the-job training, and depending on the level of responsibility given by the internship, creates or helps create computer software by using programming languages (e.g., Assembly, COBOL, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Lisp, Python), to write the code of the software. A software engineering intern can be a specialist in one area of computers, or be a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.

A Strategy Manager determines the strengths, weaknesses, operational effectiveness, and opportunities for an organization.  Their role is to prepare recommendations based on internal and external factors that minimize risks, and formulate plans in order to achieve the long-term goals of an organization.  Their responsibilities are supporting the development of the long-term organizational strategy, conducting research and analyses of operational effectiveness, processes and stakeholders, aligning departmental goals, processes and resource allocation with the organizational strategy, assessing market trends and competitors, identifying threats and opportunities, presenting findings, projections and recommended actions, and monitoring and reporting on projects.

Support engineers (also known as customer support engineers, and technical support engineers) assist customers with product questions and concerns. Support engineers are experts in a company's products, and help customers when they have problems with the product, and if possible help the customer customize the product.  They help customers work through technical or functional product difficulties, maintain procedural documents and reports, create knowledge articles for recurring and known issues, communicate with end users, prioritize customer issues, take preventive action, and ensure production is working smoothly.

System engineers manage and monitor the complete IT services and technical infrastructure of an organisation that include networking, servers, IT security, desktop, installation, configuration, data storage, email, and disaster recovery. They provide technical support for personal computers, internet, server, and networking issues. Systems Engineers ensure all IT services are properly maintained and upgraded, including anti-virus, backups, imaging, and patching and ensure that systems and infrastructure work as needed.

Infrastructure Engineer Career Path