Senior Cloud Engineer - Azure

The Senior Cloud Engineer - Managed Services is responsible for leading the day-to-day operation, administration, monitoring, support, and continuous improvement of customer cloud environments across public Clouds such as Azure, AWS, GCP or OCI. This role is primarily focused on advanced cloud operations in Azure, ITSM execution, customer advisory, mentorship, and operational improvement, with secondary exposure to automation, DevOps, and reliability practices where they improve consistency, scale, and service quality. The role is expected to independently own complex and high-risk operational work, serve as a senior escalation point for major incidents and changes, and partner with architects on major design or platform engineering decisions as appropriate. There is an expectation of some travel and after-hours/weekend support in the event of major outages/issues, or when requested by the client for change windows (or similar events). Must have knowledge on Azure cost and FinOps strategies and have experience on FinOps practices. This is an on-site role, with core working hours aligned to Eastern Time (EST).

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