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Engineering & Technology - Engineering

Infrastructure Engineering - Traffic

IC / Practitioner

Independently audited

Builds and operates the software the business runs on. Owns a defined area of the function and the outcomes it produces.

Audited package

Built, independently audited role package. Everything on this page is written for this seat.

Your Stack (Swappable)

This role works against whatever tools you already run. We list the tool categories the role operates in, never a named vendor, so you are never asked to replace a system that works.

DNS and global steering
Edge and L4-L7 proxies
Service mesh and gateway
API & Integration (iPaaS)
DDoS, WAF, and rate control
Observability & Monitoring
Config validation and rollout

Deliverables

Design documents
Review checklists
Technical standards
Delivery and sequencing plans

Responsibilities

Design, implement, test, and operate global and regional traffic steering across DNS, edge, proxies, service mesh, backend pools, and failover paths.
Build safe TLS and certificate deployment, termination, rotation, external verification, and expiry controls at the traffic layer.
Define and implement load balancing, health, locality, capacity-aware routing, rate limits, concurrency controls, and DDoS mitigations under approved policy.
Prepare simulations, canaries, stop conditions, rollback, connection draining, and cleanup for high-blast-radius configuration changes.
Diagnose traffic incidents through aligned request, route, proxy, TLS, backend, retry, capacity, and config evidence.
Publish request semantics and interfaces to application, networking-software, network, SRE, security, PKI, support, product, and capacity partners.
Model edge and backend capacity, imbalance, failure headroom, egress, retries, and unit cost by traffic class and region.
Maintain runbooks and preapproved mitigations for regional evacuation, certificate failure, attack traffic, load skew, and config rollback.

The essence of this seat

Signature move

Trace one request class across DNS, edge, TLS, proxy, route policy, mesh, backend pool, retries, and response before changing traffic behavior

What good looks like

reconstructs the same request across hops and finds the first divergent behavior

Decision rights

- - Approved traffic-policy implementation across DNS, edge, proxy, load-balancing, health, TLS deployment, rate limiting, draining, and failover controls

Working vocabulary

L4L7GSLBanycastedgeproxyservice meshupstreambackend poolhealth check

What this role does

The Infrastructure Engineering - Traffic is an IC individual contributor and the engineer who builds and operates the global request-traffic layer across DNS, edge, proxies, routing, TLS termination, load balancing, rate limiting, draining, and failover. The role's working domain is global and regional load balancing, anycast or edge routing, L4-L7 proxies, TLS and certificate deployment, rate limiting and DDoS controls, health and capacity-aware steering, connection draining, and safe traffic failover. The seat is accountable for request traffic reaches healthy capacity with predictable semantics, bounded latency, controlled abuse, safe certificate lifecycle, and reversible global change even during regional or dependency failure. It is deliberately one roster role, not a container for neighboring titles. The boundary is behavioral and operational: this seat owns L4-L7 request steering, edge and proxy policy, TLS termination, rate limiting, draining, and global failover; the Software Engineer - Infrastructure owns the broader compute, orchestration, and shared platform substrate beneath services; this seat owns production traffic policy and request-routing behavior built on network software; the Software Engineer - Networking Software and Services owns protocol implementations, data-plane and control-plane software, mesh or proxy internals, and connection machinery; this seat builds and changes the traffic layer and its operational controls; the Site Reliability Engineer owns reliability practice, SLOs, error budgets, on-call governance, and incident command. What separates a strong Infrastructure Engineering - Traffic from a generic engineer is domain judgment under failure. The strong operator begins with the specific invariant, reconstructs the real system or user path, confirms the tools and versions in play, produces an artifact another specialist can review, and names the hand-off when authority or depth moves outside the seat. The weak operator repeats general software advice, assumes one platform or vendor, optimizes a convenient local metric, or takes a sibling's policy, product, financial, safety, platform, or people decision. The core emphasis for this package is global and regional load balancing, edge and proxy policy, TLS serving, rate limits and DDoS controls, capacity-aware routing, safe connection draining and failover, retry amplification, and blast-radius-controlled traffic configuration.

Best-fit customer

engineering teams that want consistent judgement applied to design, review, and delivery

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