Senior Cloud Engineer - Azure

Duties/Responsibilities

· Lead the support and operation of cloud infrastructure, platform services, identity, networking, security controls, and operational tooling across customer environments.

· Able to architect and lead deployment of moderately complex solutions related to cloud solutions.

· Understands performance, scaling and functional characteristics of software technologies

· Ability to understand open-source and cloud use-cases, and recommend standard design patterns commonly used in such solutions (best practices).

· Own complex incidents, escalations, and problem investigations; perform advanced troubleshooting, coordination, service restoration, and follow-through to durable resolution.

· Plan and execute complex changes and recurring operational activities including provisioning, access changes, maintenance events, backup and recovery validation, patching coordination, and platform hygiene.

· Serve as a senior escalation point within the on-call rotation for major incidents, high-impact issues, and customer-approved after-hours change activity.

· Follow and reinforce established ITSM processes for incident, request, change, problem, escalation, documentation, and customer-facing status communication.

· Develop and maintain runbooks, SOPs, standards, knowledge articles, and technical documentation that improve consistency and service quality.

· Mentor other Cloud Engineers, review work for quality and completeness, and provide technical guidance on operational best practices.

· Drive monitoring, alerting, logging, tagging, policy, compliance, and cost-visibility improvements that strengthen managed cloud operations.

· Serve as the primary technical owner for customer Azure environments, including Azure landing zone governance, Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, Entra ID, and Azure cost/FinOps management.

· Use scripting, automation, and AI, to reduce repetitive effort, improve consistency, and scale service delivery.

· Apply DevOps/SRE tooling and practices (CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, source control, observability) where they improve reliability, consistency, and scale of managed cloud operations.

· Participate in customer meetings, service reviews, and advisory discussions; translate technical issues, risk, and improvement opportunities into clear business-facing communication.

· Other job duties as assigned.

Education and Experience

· Minimum Required - 5+ years in customer-facing IT infrastructure, cloud operations, systems administration, or managed services support, including work in production environments.

· Strong operational expertise in at least one major cloud platform, with the ability to lead complex support and administration activities in Azure.

· Experience leading complex incidents, escalations, change execution, and problem investigations in production environments.

· Experience with Windows and/or Linux server operations, networking fundamentals, identity and access management, monitoring, governance, and operational documentation.

· Preferred - Experience in a managed services, consulting, or multi-customer support environment, ideally supporting complex enterprise customers.

· Strong working knowledge of PowerShell, Python, Bash, infrastructure as code, automation, CI/CD, or related platform tooling used to improve cloud operations.

· Relevant advanced cloud, operations, or platform certifications are a plus, particularly Azure certifications such as Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104), Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305), or Azure DevOps Engineer Associate (AZ-400).

Knowledge, Skills, Abilities

· Advanced troubleshooting, operational execution, and issue ownership skills in live production environments.

· Ability to independently own complex and high-risk operational work, drive resolution across multiple teams, and make sound escalation decisions.

· Strong customer-facing verbal and written communication skills for technical, operational, and advisory conversations.

· Experience and ability to “jump on a whiteboard” in front of a customer to develop a solution to a business / technology goal or challenge.

· Participate in pre-sales activities including scoping, positioning, technology adoption and maturation.

· Strong documentation discipline, attention to detail, well organized, and respect for change control, service quality, and operational process.

· Strong working knowledge of identity and access management, RBAC, least privilege, networking fundamentals, security controls, governance, and monitoring concepts.

· Deep, hands-on expertise across core Azure services (Compute, Networking, Entra ID, Storage, Azure Monitor, Azure Policy) with the ability to advise customers on Azure architecture and operational best practices.

· Working knowledge of incident, request, change, problem, major incident, and escalation management in a managed services environment.

· Ability to mentor others, review technical work, promote standards, and contribute to continuous service improvement.

· Familiarity with source control, pipelines, infrastructure as code, observability, and related DevOps/SRE concepts as supporting capabilities rather than the primary focus of the role.

· Able to provide time estimates for work that needs to be accomplished based on the available information.

· Self-starter in finding work during non-scheduled work hours.

· Prioritizes and completes tasks independently on-time or ahead of schedule.

· Consistently exhibits a positive attitude towards AHEAD and its customers.

· Willing to go the extra mile when asked to do so (i.e., time outside of normal working hours to support a customer initiative, production roll-out, could also be > 40 hours for short intervals).

· Ability to travel as required.

· Highly respected by peers and sales team.

· Culture:

o Support initiatives beyond area of responsibility

o Encourage cross team interaction

o Achieve success through others and not just self-actions