At scale, infrastructure has to be provisioned, automated, and secured deliberately, and that's your domain — the servers and systems a whole organization leans on. Keeping the backbone running and growing.
The work leans toward infrastructure at scale: provisioning and configuring servers, automating with scripts and tools, managing security and backups, monitoring performance, and planning capacity. You work with engineering and operations teams. Automation is what keeps it from becoming chaos, and a misconfiguration can ripple across everything.
The stakes climb with scale — an outage or breach can hit the whole organization. On-call and off-hours maintenance come with critical infrastructure, the tooling and cloud platforms evolve fast, and you prevent problems you'll never get credit for. Cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments change the work a lot.
It tends to suit people who are systematic, automation-minded, and calm under pressure. If you want to build user-facing features or avoid on-call, the infrastructure focus may not fit. But if you like building systems that scale and rarely break, and the craft of automation, it's deep, valued work.
Where this role sits in the broader career landscape — and where it can take you.
Roles like this one sit within a broader occupational category. The numbers below reflect that full landscape — helpful for context, but your specific experience will depend on level, specialty, and where you work.
Roles with similar work and overlapping career paths
View all Technology roles →At scale, infrastructure has to be provisioned, automated, and secured deliberately, and that's your domain — the servers and systems a whole organization leans on. Keeping the backbone running and growing.
Median pay for a Systems Administrator is about $97K nationally, with the field ranging roughly from $60K to $150K depending on experience, employer, and metro (BLS).
Core skills for this role include Systems Analysis, Judgment and Decision Making, Critical Thinking, Reading Comprehension, and Complex Problem Solving.
Most people in this role hold a bachelor's degree.
Employment in this field is projected to decline about 4.2% through 2034, with roughly 318,570 people working in it today (BLS).
Closely related roles include Systems Engineer, Systems Support Engineer, and Information Technology Administrator (IT Administrator).
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