Role Summary
The Lead Azure Cloud Engineer owns the design, automation, and operational health of the Azure cloud platform. Acting as the technical anchor for the CloudOps function, this person sets engineering standards, drives infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD maturity, and leads a team of cloud/DevOps engineers while remaining hands-on across architecture, automation, and reliability.
Key Responsibilities
Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure
- 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.
Infrastructure as Code & Automation
- 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.
CI/CD & Release Engineering
- 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.
Security, Compliance & Governance
- 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.
Observability & Reliability
- 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.
Cost & Performance Optimization (FinOps)
- 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.
Technical Leadership & Mentorship
- 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.
Collaboration & Delivery
- 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.
Required Skills & Experience
- 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).
Preferred / Nice-to-Have
- 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).
