Azure Engineer III - Cloud Infrastructure & Kubernetes

Why AIS?

When you join AIS, you’re joining a mission-driven team that’s passionate about making a difference. You’ll work on projects that matter, alongside industry-leading experts, in an environment that fosters innovation, driving client success, and empowering our team to make a lasting impact. As an employee-owned company, we value collaboration, inclusivity, continuous growth, and shared success.

• Employee Ownership: Your contributions directly impact the company’s success, and you share in its achievements.

• Continuous Learning: Access to resources, training, and mentorship to support your professional growth.

• Inclusive Culture: A workplace where diversity is celebrated, and everyone’s voice is valued.

• Mission-Driven Work: Engage in projects that make a meaningful difference for our clients and communities.

 

What are we looking for?

At AIS, we're looking for more than just skills - we're looking for driven individuals who are passionate about making a difference, eager to grow, and aligned with our core principles.

 

Working@AIS
At AIS, we are dedicated to providing our employees with diverse opportunities to grow their careers while supporting a variety of impactful projects. For this position, we are seeking a talented individual to join AIS as a Senior Infrastructure Engineer.

• Core Knowledge & Skills: Designs complex network and hybrid‑cloud solutions; implements security controls, DR/BCP, and automated IaC with deployment pipelines; performs advanced performance tuning.

• Work & Complexity: Solves complex issues, designs and delivers new infrastructure solutions, performs capacity planning, and leads advanced automation initiatives.

• Quality & Independence: Drives root‑cause analysis, enforces best practices and QA on changes, optimizes for reliability and user experience; operates with high autonomy.

• Teamwork & Communication: Leads cross‑functional efforts, mentors juniors, facilitates knowledge transfer, and aligns stakeholders with technical plans.

• Consulting & Engagement: Provides strategic input on infrastructure initiatives, recommends advanced technologies, and manages vendor relationships.

As your initial project assignment, you will support the unique needs of our client as a Azure Engineer III - Cloud Infrastructure & Kubernetes. Project Summary

AIS is seeking a mid-senior Azure Engineer to design, deploy, administer, and optimize Microsoft Azure infrastructure with a strong emphasis on Kubernetes platform deployment and operations. This role will support the engineering and operational maturity of cloud environments used to host modern applications, platform services, and containerized workloads. The ideal candidate has strong experience building secure, scalable, and resilient Azure environments and has hands-on expertise deploying and supporting Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Kubernetes-based infrastructure in enterprise settings.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and maintain Azure infrastructure solutions including compute, networking, storage, identity, monitoring, and security services. 

• Build, configure, and support Kubernetes infrastructure in Azure, primarily using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). 

• Engineer and maintain foundational Azure services including Virtual Networks and subnet design; Network security groups and routing; Private endpoints and service connectivity; Load balancers and application gateways; Azure DNS and hybrid connectivity; and Storage accounts and key management services.

• Deploy and manage AKS clusters, node pools, ingress, networking, scaling, upgrades, and cluster security configurations. 

• Support container platform operations including Cluster provisioning, Workload scheduling and scaling, Logging and monitoring, Backup and recovery considerations, and Policy enforcement and namespace management.

• Implement infrastructure as code using tools such as Terraform, Bicep, or ARM templates. 

• Develop and maintain CI/CD integration points for infrastructure and platform deployment pipelines. 

• Collaborate with application teams to support container onboarding, platform requirements, and production readiness. 

• Implement and support Azure governance controls including policy, role-based access control, tagging, and subscription/resource organization. 

• Troubleshoot infrastructure, networking, and platform issues across Azure and Kubernetes environments. 

Required For This Opportunity

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience. 

• 5–8 years of infrastructure or cloud engineering experience. 

• 3+ years of hands-on Microsoft Azure engineering experience. 

• 2+ years of experience deploying and administering Kubernetes infrastructure in production or enterprise environments. 

• Strong experience with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or equivalent Kubernetes platforms. 

• Experience designing and supporting core Azure services including networking, identity, compute, and storage. 

• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code using Terraform, Bicep, or ARM. 

• Experience with scripting or automation using PowerShell, Azure CLI, Bash, or Python. 

• Experience troubleshooting distributed systems, platform infrastructure, and cloud deployments. 

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience with Azure landing zones, Hub-and-Spoke networking, Hybrid connectivity, Azure Firewall / Application Gateway / WAF, Private Link / Private DNS, and Managed Identiies and Key Vault.

• Familiarity with container ecosystem tools such as Helm, Kubernetes RBAC, Ingress Controllers, Container Registries, Service mash concepts, and policy engines and admission control.

• Knowledge of DevOps and platform engineering practices, including Git-based workflows and CI/CD pipelines. 
• Experience in regulated environments such as government, defense, healthcare, or financial services. 
• Familiarity with high-availability, disaster recovery, and production support practices. 
• Relevant Azure Certifications, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), and/or Terraform Associate Certification.

At AIS, we are committed to offering competitive and fair compensation that reflects the skills, experience, and contributions of each team member. The targeted base salary range for this role is $102,000-$154,000 per year. Please note that this range is provided as a guideline and the final offer will be based on several factors, including but not limited to, skillset and competencies, level of experience, education, certifications, and location. We value transparency in our hiring process and are happy to discuss how your unique qualifications align with our compensation structure during the interview process.

Applied Information Sciences does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other basis. Employment decisions are based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs.