The tools you have as an "industry" software engineer will be incredibly useful for helping scale research.
However modern software engineering practices from industry have not all percolated into the research world, so it may be an uphill battle to get support for resources to improve infrastructure. In some cases, it may be counter-productive to implement those practices "half-way", especially if you're a one-man infrastructure team.
Iteration speed, flexibility and ease of experimentation is paramount in the research world, so pitch the work in the context of these goals.
However modern software engineering practices from industry have not all percolated into the research world, so it may be an uphill battle to get support for resources to improve infrastructure. In some cases, it may be counter-productive to implement those practices "half-way", especially if you're a one-man infrastructure team.
Iteration speed, flexibility and ease of experimentation is paramount in the research world, so pitch the work in the context of these goals.