WHAT DOES AN INFRASTRUCTURE LEAD DO?

Published: Sep 17, 2025 - The Infrastructure Lead manages and maintains the Microsoft Office 365 environment, ensuring system standards, security protocols, and high availability of infrastructure and data are consistently upheld. This role involves acting as the primary escalation point for infrastructure-related issues, supporting IT teams, and partnering with vendors to ensure seamless system functionality and rapid response to outages. The lead also contributes to cross-departmental initiatives, including cybersecurity, inventory, and user account management, while leveraging tools like Darktrace, AlienVault, and Zero Fox to strengthen the organization's security posture.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Infrastructure Lead

1. Infrastructure Lead Tasks

  • Technology Roadmapping: Partner with GTI Product Owners and Solution Architecture teams to build a technology roadmap for the location.
  • Documentation Management: Maintain relevant documentation for in-location product deployment and associated solutions.
  • Stakeholder Engagement: Conduct periodic road map review with key stakeholders (technology, legal, compliance, risk).
  • Infrastructure Management: Partner with GTI Product Owners to manage infrastructure capacity and scalability to enable business priorities.
  • Architectural Collaboration: Collaborate with GTI teams to ensure architectural solutions are adequately translated into effective and robust implementations.
  • Requirements Analysis: Identify customer requirements, analyze alternatives and conduct product recommendations.
  • Program Leadership: Own and drive major technology programs for Corporate Centers, India.
  • Project Governance: Responsible for governance of technology infrastructure projects for Corporate Centers, India.
  • Real Estate Strategy: Responsible for governance of real estate technology strategy and associated campus/data center build-outs.

2. Infrastructure Lead Details and Accountabilities

  • Project Engagement: Ensure early GTI involvement in Projects impacting location and active involvement in technology design for strategic projects.
  • Infrastructure Coordination: Partner with Solutions architecture for infrastructure projects and an escalation point for project issues.
  • Financial Oversight: Ensure that the financial aspects of the location are managed, including the technology budget forecast and actual spends.
  • Operational Review: Conduct regular reviews with all tower Managers so that the plan is correct, that expenses are being booked correctly and that any variance is explained.
  • Product Knowledge: Understand the GTI Product and Pricing Guide and act as a liaison for LOB product queries.
  • Asset Management: Ensure robust technology asset management processes and procedures are implemented and adhered to.
  • Risk Assessment: Assess and manage the risk profile of the location, providing updates and reporting to location management and regional risk management.
  • Compliance Monitoring: Monitor and engage relevant risk forums in the location and the APAC region, ensuring mandatory compliance with the control environment.
  • Issue Management: Monitor location impacting issues and associated action plans, ensuring product owners sign off and approve their respective controls with substantiation.
  • Audit Representation: Represent the location in scope discussions, escalation of issues and draft report status of all internal and external audits in conjunction with the GTI product owners and information security managers.

3. Infrastructure Lead Job Summary

  • Regulatory Compliance: Represent technology in discussions with regulators, ensuring that the technology setup is compliant with regulatory guidelines.
  • Inspection Readiness: Maintain evergreen preparedness for regulatory inspections.
  • Vulnerability Management: Manage vulnerabilities for GTI products in partnership with product line owners (including hardware/software levels, access, museum pieces, etc.).
  • Incident Reduction: Work across location technology teams to drive down breaks, including action tracking to manage remediation.
  • Resiliency Governance: Responsible for governance of technology resiliency for GTI products and GTI India people resiliency.
  • Continuity Planning: Monitor the currency of Business Impact Analysis (BIAs) and Business Continuity Plans for the location.
  • Recovery Planning: Monitor the adequacy of Technology Recovery Plans (TRPs) for in-country products.
  • Testing Execution: Ensure comprehensive product engagement and successful Execution of annual DC Enhanced and DR Tests.
  • Resiliency Standards: Ensure technology resiliency for all GTI products in India and governance of new technology compliance with resiliency standards.
  • Call Tree Drills: Plan and execute call tree exercises as per resiliency schedules.
  • Crisis Management: Responsible for governance of crisis management and incidents impacting corporate centers, including execution in partnership with product owners and representation in SIMT.

4. Infrastructure Lead Roles and Responsibilities

  • Technology Leadership: Plan, project management, implementation and Tech Operations leadership, identifying opportunities for automation, cost savings, and service quality improvement.
  • Business Partnership: Partner closely with the business to implement IT solutions.
  • Performance Monitoring: Review and document key performance metrics and indicators.
  • Service Excellence: Ensure high performance of IT service delivery systems.
  • Infrastructure Visioning: Provide infrastructure services vision, enables innovation and seeks.
  • Innovation Alignment: Leverage IT trends that can create business value consistent with the company's requirements and expectations.
  • Strategic Planning: Interpret and develop actionable strategies and plans for supported areas.
  • Team Oversight: Oversee teams to deliver commitments aligned to line of business strategic priorities.
  • Risk Management: Recommend risk management requirements for the supported area and partner with stakeholders to implement key risk initiatives.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with and influence stakeholders and all levels of professionals, including senior managers.
  • Vendor Management: Act as an interface with third-party vendors and technology service providers supporting products within the portfolio.
  • Talent Development: Develop and guide a culture of talent development to meet business objectives and strategy.

5. Infrastructure Lead Responsibilities and Key Tasks

  • IT Oversight: Oversee end-user support and IT Infrastructure environments, project delivery and maintenance across multiple sites going through an SAP ERP implementation.
  • Infrastructure Architecture: Manage the architecture and delivery of IT Infrastructure components, including network, hardware, software, storage, servers, operating systems, and backups.
  • Legacy Modernization: Identify and execute legacy infrastructure upgrades to a modernized platform.
  • Infrastructure Planning: Develop a multi-year roadmap to prepare for EOL, lifecycle management, and technical improvements across the IT infrastructure landscape, including desktop/laptop and server OS refresh plans in alignment with business needs and to harden security posture.
  • Network Optimization: Lead consolidation and improvement of network infrastructure.
  • Technical Consultation: Initiate technical discussions with stakeholders that drive IT Infrastructure decisions.
  • Disaster Recovery: Develop a disaster recovery plan to ensure RPO and RTO objectives are met.
  • Security Compliance: Ensure systems and the IT environment adhere to security and compliance requirements.
  • Infrastructure Advisory: Advise and make recommendations concerning IT infrastructure and related issues.

6. Infrastructure Lead Duties and Roles

  • Client Engagement: Manage client engagements and provide direction in the areas of Cloud, Containers, Network routing, SSL certificates, Virtualization, System automation, Compute, Storage and OS setup.
  • Project Leadership: Own overall planning, execution, and success of complex technical projects with the clients.
  • Product Strategy: Contribute to product strategy and company vision, evolving current infrastructure offerings with more capabilities, such as AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes stacks.
  • Technology Monitoring: Follow community updates to stay current with platform capabilities and adapt them to improve the service provided to customers.
  • Team Culture: Cultivate a transparent and collaborative culture that contributes to excellence in delivery.
  • Digital Transformation: Help the clients transform from a legacy mindset to a modern mindset focused on automation, containerization, orchestration and DevOps.
  • Team Leadership: Build, lead, and motivate a high-performance, client-focused MSP team.
  • Performance Management: Help set and manage success metrics across MSP members.
  • Global Collaboration: Work in a highly geographically distributed environment, with members/clients spread across multiple countries and different time zones.
  • Talent Acquisition: Recruit top talent to grow the MSP team.
  • Best Practices: Participate in the evolution of company-level best practices, standards, and policies.

7. Infrastructure Lead Essential Functions

  • Solution Resilience: Ensure that the solutions being deployed are resilient, supportable and documented.
  • Cross-Team Collaboration: Collaborate with personnel across multiple departments and technologies on cross-team projects.
  • Cloud Architecture: Ensure that design and infrastructure are “cloud-ready”, leveraging the latest design patterns and deployment techniques from the appropriate partner.
  • Lifecycle Management: Set expectations and priorities throughout the infrastructure life cycle.
  • Agile Participation: Work as a member of an agile team.
  • Project Oversight: Oversee team members on associated project work.
  • Team Leadership: Manage workload, provide leadership.
  • Architecture Planning: Enhance the architecture team's accomplishments and competence by planning the delivery of solutions.
  • Technical Guidance: Answer technical and procedural questions for less experienced team members.
  • Mentorship Support: Teach improved processes and mentor team members.

8. SoC Verification Infrastructure Lead Details

  • Environment Development: Participate in the development of verification/validation environments of complex design components.
  • System Bring-Up: Bring up Validation Environments and Acceptance regressions for various domains.
  • Interface Definition: Define module interfaces/formats for simulation.
  • Testbench Creation: Develop and build test benches for the design under test.
  • Test Planning: Identify, document and execute test plans on various platforms.
  • Verification Suite: Develop and debug random constrained verification test suites to fully verify the design under test.
  • Infrastructure Definition: Participate in the definition of verification/validation infrastructure, and documentation for IP, SoC and system-level development.
  • Pre-Silicon Validation: Pre-silicon validation of designs that include processor cores and custom logic working together.

9. Infrastructure Lead Job Summary

  • O365 Administration: Manage, configure, and maintain the Microsoft Office 365 environment.
  • System Governance: Develop and implement system standards, processes, and security that maintain the health of the environment.
  • Issue Escalation: Act as escalation resource for any related system/infrastructure issues under his/her responsibility, providing support to the IT Support.
  • Employee Support: Demonstrate high standards for Employee Support Services.
  • Infrastructure Monitoring: Manage network and endpoint monitoring, plan resources for high availability of infrastructure and data.
  • Escalation Support: Provide support escalation to the IT Support Team.
  • Vendor Coordination: Partner with the vendor technical resource to ensure the technology infrastructure functions appropriately.
  • Outage Response: Ensure outages are dealt with quickly and effectively.
  • Policy Development: Establish best practice policy and procedures through the entire technical support process.
  • IT Collaboration: Collaborate with other IT members on cross-department projects, including cybersecurity initiatives, inventory management and user account management.
  • Security Tools: Work with security tools such as Darktrace, AlienVault, and Zero Fox.

10. IT Network Infrastructure Lead General Responsibilities

  • Service Supervision: Supervise the Network Managed Service providers and participate in the delivery of a helpful, responsive and courteous service to all staff and stakeholders and to work in co-operation with all sections of IT in delivering excellent customer service.
  • Vendor Management: Manage the Network Managed Service providers and attend weekly, monthly and quarterly service review meetings.
  • Incident Resolution: Responsible for ensuring that incidents and service requests related to the network infrastructure are appropriately logged with relevant, clear and accurate diagnostic information and resolved or completed in accordance with agreed service targets.
  • Change Control: Ensure that all IT changes related to the scope of the role are logged, approved and implemented in accordance with the IT Change Management policy and process.
  • Service Improvement: Contribute to the delivery of Network Infrastructure services in accordance with industry best practice (for example, ITIL) and search for continual service improvement of all delivered services.
  • IT Collaboration: Collaborate with the Head of IT Applications and Infrastructure Support and as a result of business engagement.
  • Strategic Planning: Develop plans for building solutions and environments that address the University’s business and technical strategies that are conducive to quick and inexpensive network infrastructure delivery.
  • Capacity and Security: Responsible for capacity planning and security improvement tasks and review of high-level and low-level designs along with migration plans related to the network infrastructure.
  • Preventative Maintenance: Oversee, plan and schedule regular proactive and preventative maintenance tasks, including patches, updates and upgrades to operating systems, firmware components, and others in line with manufacturers' recommendations whilst minimizing disruption to users.
  • Documentation Management: Produce and maintain IT Network Infrastructure technical documentation, processes and procedures and Knowledge Management articles.
  • Technical Escalation: Act as a technical escalation point for network-related queries.

11. Infrastructure Lead Additional Details

  • Technical Execution: Execute technical installations in a GxP/CSV environment.
  • Information Management: Gather and maintain technical information for said installations.
  • System Inventory Management: Manage computer system inventories and prepare hardware staging for planned deployments, including network pre-configuration before deployment and troubleshooting of network issues before and after.
  • Hardware Configuration: Configure and install level 2 hardware devices such as serial-to-Ethernet adapters and serial (RS232) devices.
  • Order Tracking: Hardware order tracking and reporting.
  • Deployment Monitoring: Monitor and report on the deployment of network hardware and configuration by central teams.
  • Multi-Phase Deployment: Manage multi-phase deployment of computers and low-level hardware systems.
  • Team Culture: Help create a positive environment where engineers can thrive.
  • Collaborative Planning: Hold discussions, collect and consolidate ideas, and help facilitate strategies to reach the shared technical vision.

12. Infrastructure Lead Functions

  • Start-up Culture: Create and reinforce the start-up culture of a new business for Dell.
  • Team Leadership: Lead a virtual team of compute, storage and networking technologists.
  • Supplier Engagement: Engage with strategic technology suppliers to extract the best components for inclusion in forward-facing HW platforms.
  • Architecture Optimization: Balance between the capabilities of emerging HW architectures and the firmware or software design surface to optimally exploit both.
  • Resource Utilization: Leverage the vast capabilities and resources of the world's largest end-to-end IT supplier.
  • Lifecycle Contribution: Contribute to all stages of the product life-cycle, design, implementation, testing, releasing and maintenance.
  • Agile Practice: Work in a lightweight agile process, evaluate how the work and try to improve.
  • Continuous Learning: Through hack-days, courses, conferences, or tech-talks, emphasize learning and also expect to share knowledge with colleagues.

13. Infrastructure Lead Duties

  • Infrastructure Ownership: Take ownership of the infrastructure of Scorpio Labs (includes managing the current IT team).
  • Infrastructure Management: Plan, manage and monitor the infrastructure.
  • Architecture Planning: Determine the architecture for the future needs.
  • Infrastructure Administration: Administrate infrastructure, including firewalls, data centers, and malware protection software.
  • System Configuration: Manage the configuration and operation of computer operating systems, Linux/Windows.
  • Technical Support: Provide technical support for both hardware and software issues for users.
  • Cloud Transformation: Partner with a team of engineers through a transformation of the Athena Web Platform to a resilient and scalable cloud-based architecture.
  • Developer Experience: Optimize the experience for developers building and deploying web applications in Athena.

14. Infrastructure Lead Role Purpose

  • Incident Resolution: Lead on the investigation and resolution of desktop infrastructure incidents.
  • Technical Escalation: Act as the technical escalation point and SME for the business.
  • Team Leadership: Leadership, development, and management of a customer-focused Desktop Infrastructure team.
  • Pre-Deployment Testing: Accountable for pre-deployment testing for all planned patches and OS releases.
  • Patch Strategy: Design of the patch and release management strategy to improve efficiency.
  • Deployment Optimization: Increase deployment success and meet business needs and minimize disruption or downtime.
  • Documentation Standards: Maintain effective local documentation, including standard operating procedures, best practices, and methodologies for application packaging, OS deployment, and vulnerability patching process.
  • Technical Alignment: Align technical strategy with other partner teams across CIB to deliver a complete and coherent experience for web developers.
  • Monitoring Enhancement: Partner with the Athena SRE team to uplift monitoring and telemetry of the web stack.
Relevant Information
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