About the role
- Design, provision, and evolve Azure landing zones, resource hierarchies, networking (VNets, NSGs, private endpoints), and identity boundaries.
- Lead cloud migration and modernization workstreams — rehost/replatform/refactor decisions, target-state architecture, and cutover planning.
- Own core platform services (AKS, App Services, Functions, Azure SQL, storage tiers such as ADLS Gen 2, Event Hub, Key Vault) and their integration patterns.
- Define reference architectures and guardrails that downstream teams build against.
- Establish and enforce IaC standards using Terraform and/or Bicep/ARM, including module libraries, versioning, and state management.
- Automate environment provisioning end to end so environments are reproducible, disposable, and drift-free.
- Build automation for routine operational tasks (scaling, backups, patching, secrets rotation) to reduce manual toil.
- Own the CI/CD strategy and pipelines (Azure DevOps / Azure Pipelines or GitHub Actions), including build, test, artifact management, and multi-stage deployments.
- Implement branching and release strategy (e.g., Git Flow / trunk-based) with quality gates, approvals, and automated rollback.
- Integrate automated testing and code-quality gates into the pipeline so releases are safe and repeatable.
- Implement Azure RBAC, least-privilege access, and identity governance (Entra ID, managed identities, PIM).
- Embed security into the pipeline — SAST/DAST scanning, dependency checks, secret scanning, and policy-as-code (Azure Policy).
- Maintain compliance posture against relevant standards (e.g., SOX, SOC 2) through audit trails, controls, and evidence automation.
- Stand up monitoring, logging, and alerting (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, App Insights) with meaningful SLOs and dashboards.
- Lead incident response, root-cause analysis, and blameless post-mortems; drive reliability improvements from findings.
- Own DR/backup strategy, high-availability design, and periodic resilience testing.
- Monitor and optimize cloud spend — rightsizing, reserved capacity, autoscaling, and tagging for cost allocation.
- Provide cost visibility and forecasting to stakeholders and flag optimization opportunities proactively.
- Set technical direction and engineering standards for the cloud/DevOps team; lead code and design reviews.
- Mentor and upskill engineers, and act as escalation point for complex platform issues.
- Contribute to sprint planning, backlog shaping, and effort estimation as the technical lead within the POD.
- Partner with data, application, and security teams to align infrastructure with delivery roadmaps and dependencies.
- Translate business and platform requirements into cloud solutions, and communicate technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders.
- Champion DevOps culture — shared ownership, automation-first, and continuous improvement across teams.
- Strong hands-on Azure expertise across compute, networking, storage, identity, and PaaS services.
- Proven IaC experience with Terraform and/or Bicep/ARM in production.
- Deep CI/CD experience, ideally with Azure DevOps, plus scripting (PowerShell, Bash, and/or Python).
- Solid grounding in containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes/AKS).
- Experience with cloud security, RBAC, and governance at scale.
- Demonstrated technical leadership — mentoring, standard-setting, and driving delivery.
- Relevant certifications a plus: Azure Administrator/Solutions Architect (AZ-104 / AZ-305), DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400).
- Experience modernizing legacy or on-prem workloads into Azure.
- Familiarity with data-platform tooling in an Azure ecosystem (Snowflake, SnapLogic, DBT, Event Hub/Kafka).
- Exposure to FinOps practices and multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
- Experience operating under regulated/compliance-heavy conditions (SOX, SOC 2).