Roles

Operational Excellence

Leadership & Stakeholder Roles

Operations Manager – Oversees day-to-day activities; key for process ownership, KPIs, and readiness planning.
Product Owner / Product Manager – Ensures business needs align with technical priorities and backlog reflects operational objectives.
Project Manager – Coordinates cross-functional delivery and is responsible for timelines, risks, and delivery quality.
Team Lead / Manager – Understands team capabilities, role clarity, and communication flows; crucial for culture and process discussions.
Executive Sponsor – Brings strategic oversight; ensures recommendations align with broader business outcomes.
Stakeholder Engagement Lead – Ensures cross-departmental feedback and consensus are captured in decisions.
Organizational Leadership – Provides authority to approve changes and resource commitments for improvement actions.
Business Analyst – Bridges business objectives and operational insights; helps translate needs into requirements and metrics.

Technical & Engineering Roles

DevOps Engineer – Key to automation, deployment, telemetry, and continuous improvement practices.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) – Expert in system resilience, observability, and reducing operational toil.
Cloud Operations Manager / Engineer – Brings understanding of cloud infrastructure health, performance, and alerts.
System Administrator – Involved in incident handling, rollback, patching, and support processes.
Software Developer – Contributes knowledge of application behavior, code quality, and deployment practices.
Release Manager – Ensures structured and safe release processes, rollback planning, and schedule adherence.
Technical Architect – Brings technical governance and consistency across systems and development teams.

Analytics, QA, and Governance

Data Analyst – Provides data to back up decisions; helps monitor trends, KPIs, and metrics dashboards.
Quality Assurance Analyst / Engineer / Specialist – Key for test coverage, code quality, release readiness, and defect management.
Risk Management Officer / Analyst – Identifies, evaluates, and mitigates operational risks across workflows.
Compliance Officer – Ensures operational processes meet governance and regulatory standards.
Governance Officer – Provides structure and validation for processes involving ownership, approvals, and change control.

Support & Incident Management

Incident Response Manager / Lead – Responsible for coordinating responses, escalations, and resolution workflows.
Support Engineer / Technician – Provides practical insight into support processes, runbooks, and recurring issues.
Change Management Lead – Ensures changes are controlled, communicated, and compliant with policy.
Communications Specialist – Ensures incident and operations status is clearly and consistently communicated to stakeholders.

Security

Governance & Oversight

Security Architect – Designs the overall security posture of workloads and ensures proper architectural patterns are followed.
Compliance Officer – Ensures that security practices meet legal, regulatory, and internal policy requirements.
Cloud Security Architect / Engineer – Responsible for cloud-native security controls, encryption, and IAM configuration.
Security Analyst – Tracks evolving threats, analyzes risks, and performs vulnerability assessments.
Security Operations Center (SOC) Analyst – Provides real-time threat detection, monitoring, and alert response expertise.

Identity, Access, and Data Protection

IAM Administrator / Identity and Access Manager – Oversees user and machine identity controls, roles, and permissions.
Data Owner / Data Steward – Defines classifications, access needs, and data retention policies.
Data Governance Officer / Manager – Ensures data security aligns with data usage, classification, and lifecycle standards.
Data Protection Officer / Data Security Officer – Ensures privacy, encryption, and data handling align with compliance obligations.

Engineering, DevOps & App Security

DevOps Engineer – Implements secure pipelines (DevSecOps), automates control testing, and embeds security into CI/CD.
Software Developer / Application Developer – Ensures application code adheres to secure coding practices and collaborates on threat modeling.
Application Security Trainer / Security Champion – Promotes secure development knowledge and ownership within dev teams.
QA Engineer / Quality Assurance Analyst – Verifies that security controls are covered in testing plans and test automation.

Infrastructure & Network

Network Architect / Network Security Engineer – Designs secure network topologies, segmentation, and traffic controls.
System Administrator – Implements and manages OS-level security, patching, and endpoint protections.
IT Operations Manager / Engineer – Ensures system and resource-level configurations are secure and consistent.
Cloud Architect – Provides visibility over how security aligns with workload architecture and business needs.

Incident Response & Forensics

Incident Response Manager / Analyst – Coordinates detection, response, investigation, and post-incident review.
Forensic Specialist / IT Security Engineer – Performs forensic analysis and ensures evidence is preserved in incident cases.
Training Coordinator – Organizes security awareness, simulation exercises (e.g., tabletop or red team events).
Communication Officer / Legal Advisor / Public Relations Officer – Ensures appropriate messaging and actions in security incidents.

Security Lifecycle & Automation

Security Engineer – Implements security controls, automation, scanning, and remediation in infrastructure and pipelines.
Project Manager – Ensures implementation timelines and risk priorities align with project delivery plans.
Threat Intelligence Analyst – Tracks emerging threats and helps prioritize mitigations.
Operations Manager – Oversees operational impacts of security issues and enforcement of remediations.

Reliability

Leadership & Oversight

Cloud Architect – Key technical lead for designing resilient architectures and ensuring availability SLAs are achievable.
Project Manager – Coordinates timelines and actions to improve reliability and disaster recovery plans.
Operations Manager – Oversees day-to-day workload stability and incident response readiness.
Product Owner / Product Manager – Ensures reliability aligns with business impact and user expectations.
Compliance Officer – Validates regulatory and policy compliance (especially for DR and backup).

Engineering & Infrastructure

DevOps Engineer – Implements resilience patterns (e.g., failover, automation), manages CI/CD, and leads infrastructure as code.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) – Monitors and optimizes service health, SLOs, and reduces toil via automation.
System Administrator – Ensures backups, patching, system-level recovery, and platform stability.
Network Architect / Engineer – Designs reliable network topologies and ensures redundancy in connectivity.
Security Engineer / Specialist – Validates that resilience doesn’t compromise security posture (e.g., encrypted backups).

Testing, Monitoring & Quality

Quality Assurance Engineer / Analyst – Tests resilience under failure conditions and verifies successful deployment outcomes.
Incident Response Manager / Team Member – Manages real-time issues, escalations, and post-incident reviews.
Chaos Engineering Specialist – Introduces controlled failure to validate system robustness under stress.
Data Analyst – Monitors trends, performance, and alerts tied to system degradation or recovery.
Game Day Facilitator – Leads simulated failure exercises (“game days”) to assess organizational readiness.

Backup & Disaster Recovery

Backup Administrator – Manages and verifies the integrity of system backups.
Data Architect / Data Owner – Defines data criticality and ensures backups align with data retention and recovery needs.
Disaster Recovery Coordinator / Manager – Creates and enforces DR plans, RTOs/RPOs, and recovery workflows.
Business Continuity Planner / Analyst – Ensures alignment of recovery efforts with business continuity expectations.
Infrastructure Manager – Supports DR capabilities at the platform level.

Architecture & API Governance

Solution Architect / Software Architect – Designs failure-tolerant systems and distributed service patterns.
API Product Owner / API Developer – Defines API contract stability, idempotency, and resilience in interfaces.
Technical Writer – Ensures runbooks and service documentation are clear and up to date (optional, for highly regulated environments).

Performance Efficiency

Leadership & Planning

Cloud Architect – Central role in designing efficient cloud architectures; advises on resource selection, scalability, and patterns.
Project Manager – Ensures performance objectives align with project delivery goals, constraints, and timelines.
Product Manager – Aligns performance goals with customer expectations and product requirements.
Operations Manager – Oversees the impact of performance efficiency on daily operations and SLAs.

Technical & Engineering

DevOps Engineer – Implements automation, monitoring, and CI/CD for performance tuning and right-sizing.
Performance Engineer – Specializes in testing and tuning applications and infrastructure for performance.
Application Developer – Contributes insights on code-level optimization and hardware acceleration needs.
Cloud Solutions Architect – Helps design and evaluate architectures that scale efficiently and follow best practices.
System Administrator – Handles OS and compute configurations that affect system throughput and availability.
Network Architect / Engineer – Optimizes network paths, protocols, and configurations for performance-sensitive workloads.
Security Engineer / Specialist – Ensures security controls don’t negatively affect performance (e.g., VPN overhead).
Infrastructure Operations Manager – Responsible for the infrastructure’s operational readiness and performance impact.

Data & Storage

Data Architect – Designs efficient data storage, access, and caching strategies.
Database Administrator – Tunes and manages database configurations, indexing, and query performance.
Data Engineer – Supports high-performance data pipelines and access patterns.
Data Analyst – Provides metrics and trends to support performance decisions.

Quality & Monitoring

Quality Assurance Analyst / Engineer – Validates performance under load; conducts regression testing during changes.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) – Focuses on availability, latency, and performance, especially in production environments.
Cost Management Analyst / FinOps Analyst – Assesses performance efficiency in the context of cost (e.g., underutilization).

Supporting Roles

Technical Consultant – Offers external or partner-specific architecture guidance and benchmarking.
Product Owner – Defines performance-related features and acceptance criteria.
Cloud Engineer – Supports compute and storage configuration for cloud-native apps.
Business Analyst – Maps business needs to performance indicators (e.g., user experience latency).

Cost Optimization

Financial & Cost Management

Cloud Financial Manager – Owns budgeting, forecasting, and financial alignment with cloud cost strategies.
Cloud Financial Analyst / IT Finance Officer – Analyzes actual vs. forecast costs, tracks trends, and advises on financial governance.
Cost Analyst / Cloud Cost Analyst – Provides detailed cost breakdowns, tracks service utilization, and suggests cost-saving opportunities.
FinOps Specialist / Analyst / Team Member – Applies FinOps practices to connect engineering, finance, and business for cloud spending decisions.
Finance Analyst / Finance Manager / Finance Partner – Aligns cloud spend with financial goals and reports on business value.

Architecture & Engineering

Cloud Architect – Ensures workload design aligns with cost-effective patterns and efficient resource usage.
Solutions Architect – Advises on architecture changes for cost savings and evaluates service cost models.
DevOps Engineer – Implements automation, monitoring, scaling, and lifecycle management to optimize resource usage.
AWS Solutions Architect – Provides guidance on AWS-specific cost-saving opportunities and service changes.
Cloud Administrator / AWS Administrator – Manages resource provisioning and cost-control settings like tagging and account structures.

Analytics, Governance & Process

Data Analyst – Supports cost analysis, forecasting, and modeling through data insights and reports.
IT Operations Manager / IT Manager / Support Staff – Ensures operational practices support cost-saving activities (e.g., decommissioning, tagging).
Project Manager / Product Owner / Team Lead – Helps embed cost awareness in project planning, lifecycle, and team decision-making.
Compliance Officer / Data Governance Officer – Ensures cost policies (e.g., data retention, licensing) comply with governance standards.
Operations Manager / Department Head – Oversees cost accountability across teams or units and ensures team alignment with cost controls.

Strategy & Planning

Business Stakeholder / Business Unit Leader – Provides business context for decisions that trade off cost vs. value.
Procurement Specialist – Negotiates third-party contracts and validates licensing cost-efficiency.

Sustainability

Sustainability & Governance

Sustainability Lead / Sustainability Program Manager – Drives sustainability strategy, sets goals, and ensures alignment with organizational priorities.
Sustainability Officer / Champion / Specialist / Manager – Advocates for sustainable practices, monitors metrics, and supports embedding sustainability in technical and operational decisions.
Governance and Compliance Lead – Ensures that resource usage and environmental impact are tracked and aligned with compliance and ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) commitments.

Architecture & Engineering

Cloud Architect – Designs sustainable infrastructure and selects regions, instance types, and services that optimize environmental impact.
Solutions Architect – Implements architectural patterns that promote efficiency in both software and hardware usage.
Infrastructure Architect / Engineer – Ensures infrastructure setup supports minimal energy use and high utilization.
Storage Engineer / Database Administrator – Manages storage solutions that minimize energy, duplication, and data movement.

Software & DevOps

DevOps Engineer – Automates scaling, deployment, and usage optimization; crucial for dynamic infrastructure that aligns with demand.
Software Developer / Application Developer – Refactors code to minimize compute demands and supports asynchronous processing.
Systems Engineer – Supports system-level changes that reduce waste and improve efficiency across compute environments.

Data & Analytics

Data Engineer / Data Analyst – Helps analyze usage patterns and supports data retention, classification, and lifecycle policies.
Data Classification Owner / Data Steward – Ensures that unnecessary or redundant data is reduced in line with sustainability goals.
Security and Compliance Manager / Compliance Specialist / Officer – Ensures that data and system handling meet environmental and legal standards.

Leadership & Strategy

Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – Ensures technical decisions reflect sustainability strategy across architecture and investment.
Product Owner / Product Manager – Helps align user and business outcomes with sustainability goals and feature prioritization.
Operations Manager / IT Manager / IT Administrator – Ensures that IT operations are optimized for low energy consumption and maintenance overhead.
QA Specialist / Quality Assurance Engineer – Validates that efficiency improvements and sustainable practices are embedded in development/testing processes.