job summary
We're seeking an Azure Engineer with ITOps expertise to work on a team focused on keeping the systems secure, stable, and available. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in production support, strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, and a genuine passion for ensuring critical systems operate smoothly and efficiently. You'll collaborate closely with product, security, and operations teams to automate everything-provisioning, deployments, observability, incident response, and compliance-while supporting a rotational shift model to ensure 24x7 coverage.
location: Telecommute
job type: Contract
salary: $70 - 80 per hour
work hours: 9am to 5pm
education: Bachelors
responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain Azure landing zones and platform services (e.g., VNet, Private Endpoints, Key Vault, Azure Firewall/NSGs, Application Gateway/WAF)
- Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform and/or Bicep; enforce GitOps workflows (branching, PRs, policy checks)
- Create reusable modules, pipelines, and golden patterns for app teams; champion automation-first approaches
- Define and measure SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and reliability roadmaps for critical services
- Implement and tune observability (logs, metrics, traces) using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, and PrometheGrafana where applicable
- Conduct capacity planning, resiliency testing (chaos, failover, DR), and performance tuning across services
- Build secure, robust CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps Pipelines) with automated testing, scans, and approvals
- Standardize deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rolling) for containerized and PaaS workloads
- Implement guardrails using Azure Policy, RBAC, PIM, and Blueprints (or equivalent) to enforce least privilege and compliance (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA as relevant)
- Manage secrets and certificates (Key Vault) and integrate security testing (SAST/DAST/Container scanning) into pipelines
- Support vulnerability remediation and patching SLAs
- Own incident response, including rotational shifts and on-call; lead triage, root cause analysis (RCA), and post-incident reviews
- Optimize cost (FinOps), tagging standards, budgets, and proactive spending alerts
- Maintain runbooks, knowledge base articles, and automation for routine operations
- Act as a technical mentor; review designs/PRs; contribute to architecture decisions
- Partner with app teams to onboard workloads, define nonfunctional requirements, and drive platform adoption
qualifications
5 to 7 years of hands-on experience supporting Azure-based infrastructure and services in production
Expertise in several of: AKS, App Services, Functions, APIM, Azure SQL/MI, Cosmos DB, Storage, Event Hub/Service Bus, Redis, VNet/Peering, Private Link, Application Gateway/WAF, Front Door
Strong IaC with Terraform (preferred) and/or Bicep; Git-based workflows; GitHub or Azure DevOps
Proven SRE background: SLI/SLO design, error budgets, incident management, RCA, capacity and performance engineering
CI/CD design and operations (GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps Pipelines); artifact/versioning strategies; release governance
Observability with Azure: Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, and alerting/automations (Action Groups, Logic Apps, Functions)
Solid networking fundamentals (DNS, TLS, routing, firewalls, load balancing), identity (AAD/Entra ID), and secrets management (Key Vault)
Scripting proficiency in PowerShell and/or Python; Linux fundamentals
Strong understanding of Azure security best practices, including Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Privileged Identity Management (PIM), Azure Policy, and Managed Identities for secure access management and governance
skills
APIM
Application Insights
automated testing
AAD
Azure DevOps Pipelines
Bicep
Azure Monitor
CI/CD
Cosmos DB
robust CI/CD pipelines
deployment strategies
DNS
DAST
Firewall
firewalls
Git-based workflows
GitHub Actions
GitHub
Grafana
Identity Management
ITOps
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
secrets management
Key Vault
Linux
load balancing
Log Analytics
versioning
Azure
Azure DevOps
Logic Apps
networking fundamentals
Peering
performance tuning
PaaS
Prometheus
Python
Redis
RBAC
Role-Based Access Control
routing
Azure SQL
Scripting proficiency
vulnerability remediation
SAST
Terraform
TLS
PowerShell
analytical
passion
troubleshooting skills
reliability
proactive
secure access
architecture
automate
automation
automations
Blueprints
budgets
capacity planning
FinOps
governance
HIPAA
ISO 27001
incident reviews
incident management
incident response
infrastructure
knowledge base
tagging
technical mentor
metrics
performance engineering
production support
root cause analysis
RCA
security
security best practices
security testing
Standardize
triage
workflows