A principal infrastructure engineer is an accomplished technical leader.
At this role level, you will:
develop strategic and tactical engineering roadmaps for technologies and services in your area of responsibility, ensuring they're future-proofed and that the organisation derives maximum value from investment in technologies
potentially own the operational relationships with suppliers, ensuring services and products are delivered and aligned to industry best practice and regulatory and contractual requirements
work with technical architects to translate the architectural designs into operations and support technical architects in operationalising the designs
lead and direct infrastructure specialist teams in building, managing, supporting and maintaining solutions according to departmental policy (if taking a managerial path)
design and implement infrastructure solutions and services, for example, networking and physical infrastructure, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software, open source packages and solutions, or virtual and cloud computing
establish standards and procedures across a service product life cycle, including the development product life cycle, and can ensure that practitioners adhere to these
manage resources to ensure that the systems integration function works effectively
use lateral thinking to break a problem down into its component parts to identify and diagnose root causes
troubleshoot and identify problems across different technology capabilities including computing, storage, networking, physical infrastructure, software, commercial-off-the-shelf software (COTS) and open source software