I have not meet many folks who carry the job title Infrastructure Automation Engineer. I have seen the jobs postings on the major national resume banks and here in the local tech hub where I live. I have meet only one other person who had this exact title. I will give my own definition as per my own job description.

My role as Infrastructure Automation Engineer (Test Engineer, Build Engineer) is to: design, build, test, and deploy effective automation solutions. I apply Perl, PHP and C programming to meet the short and long term goals of my Automation Engineering activities. My goal is to automate as much of the manual efforts as possible.

There are usually three reasons for automation that I follow. The first is coverage. Coverage is the attempt to automate everything that can be automated. This is a worthy goal but ultimately unattainable. The second and most important is to relieve high effort. When I get receive a request to automate a process it is usually because the engineer feels they should spend their time doing something innovative as opposed to doing something repetitive. My third reason is maintenance programming. If one of the engineers has automated a process them selfs and hard coded the program so it is tailor made for their use, I will go in and turn a good program that works well for one person into a good program that works well for everyone who does what they do.

Many time the Automation Engineer will take the unit test designed by an application developer and plug that unit test into their build framework. Larger companies separate roles more than smaller companies do. I have worked exclusively for small semiconductor startups.

My intention is to showcase many of the templates I have developed and now use to quicken the development of build / automation scripts that I develop in Perl.