Principle Systems Engineer

Principal System Engineer - Azure

Role Overview

We are looking for a Principal System Engineer - Azure to provide deep technical leadership for designing, building, operating, and continuously improving large-scale Azure infrastructure and platform services.

The ideal candidate will have strong expertise across Azure IaaS and PaaS, with a deep understanding of networking, compute, storage, identity, security, observability, resiliency, disaster recovery, and infrastructure automation.

The role requires someone who can operate effectively at both the architecture and engineering level -able to design the solution, challenge existing designs, troubleshoot complex production issues, and personally drive implementation where required.

Required Technical Skills

Must Have

• 12+ years of experience in infrastructure, systems engineering, cloud engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of strong hands-on Azure experience.
• Deep expertise in Azure IaaS.
• Strong knowledge of Azure PaaS services.
• Strong Azure networking fundamentals.
• Strong understanding of Microsoft Entra ID and Azure RBAC.
• Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience using Terraform and/or Bicep.
• Strong PowerShell and/or Azure CLI skills.
• Experience with Azure monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Experience designing highly available and resilient Azure environments.
• Strong understanding of hybrid Azure/on-premises architectures.
• Experience with production-scale Azure environments.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving capability.
• Ability to independently drive complex technical problems to resolution.

Key Responsibilities

Azure Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

• Design, implement, and operate enterprise-scale Azure infrastructure across IaaS and PaaS services.
• Own technical architecture and engineering decisions for complex Azure environments.
• Design highly available, scalable, secure, and resilient Azure solutions.
• Lead infrastructure modernization, cloud migration, and platform transformation initiatives.
• Establish Azure infrastructure standards, reference architectures, and engineering best practices.
• Evaluate Azure services and determine appropriate technology choices based on business and technical requirements.
• Drive continuous improvement of platform reliability, scalability, performance, security, and operational efficiency.

Azure IaaS

Strong hands-on expertise with:

• Azure Virtual Machines and VM Scale Sets
• Availability Zones and Availability Sets
• Managed Disks and Azure Storage
• Azure Virtual Network, Subnets, NSGs and UDRs
• Azure Load Balancer
• Application Gateway / WAF
• Azure Firewall
• Azure VPN Gateway and ExpressRoute
• Private Endpoints and Private DNS
• Azure Bastion
• Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery
• Azure Monitor and Log Analytics

Azure PaaS

Experience designing and operating Azure PaaS services such as:

• Azure App Service
• Azure Functions
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Azure Container Instances / container platforms
• Azure API Management
• Azure Service Bus
• Event Grid
• Azure Key Vault
• Azure SQL / managed database services
• Azure Cache and other managed platform services
• Azure Storage services

The candidate should understand when to use managed PaaS services versus IaaS, including the operational, security, scalability, availability, and cost trade-offs.

Networking

Deep understanding of Azure networking is highly important.

Responsibilities include:

• Designing hub-and-spoke and enterprise-scale network architectures
• VNet peering and Virtual WAN concepts
• Private Link / Private Endpoint architectures
• DNS architecture and troubleshooting
• ExpressRoute and hybrid connectivity
• VPN architecture
• Azure Firewall and network security controls
• Routing, UDRs, NSGs and traffic flows
• Load balancing and application delivery
• Network troubleshooting using packet-level and platform telemetry
• Integration of Azure with on-premises and other cloud environments

Security & Identity

• Design Azure environments following security-by-design principles.
• Strong understanding of Microsoft Entra ID, RBAC, Managed Identity and service principals.
• Implement least-privilege access models.
• Design secure network segmentation and private connectivity.
• Work with security teams on Defender for Cloud, security posture, vulnerability management, and incident response.
• Implement secrets, certificates, and key management using Azure Key Vault.
• Understand Azure Policy, governance, compliance, and resource controls.

Infrastructure as Code & Automation

Strong hands-on experience with infrastructure automation is expected.

• Azure Bicep / ARM Templates and/or Terraform
• PowerShell and/or Azure CLI
• Git-based infrastructure management
• CI/CD automation
• Automated provisioning and configuration
• Infrastructure testing and validation
• Policy-as-code and governance automation
• Automated remediation and operational tooling

The candidate should be able to write and review production-quality automation, not merely consume existing scripts.

Reliability, Resiliency & Disaster Recovery

• Design solutions for high availability and fault tolerance.
• Develop regional and multi-region architectures where required.
• Define and implement RTO/RPO strategies.
• Design backup, restore, and disaster recovery solutions.
• Participate in DR testing and failure-recovery exercises.
• Develop self-healing and automated remediation capabilities.
• Perform capacity planning and resilience assessments.
• Lead technical root-cause analysis for major production incidents.

Microsoft's mission-critical Azure guidance specifically highlights patterns such as multi-region/Availability Zone resilience, self-healing, scale-out, observability, and regular recovery testing. (Microsoft Learn)

Observability & Operations

• Design comprehensive Azure monitoring and observability solutions.
• Strong experience with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights and alerting.
• Develop operational dashboards and health models.
• Define SLI/SLO and operational metrics where appropriate.
• Troubleshoot complex performance, availability, networking, and infrastructure issues.
• Lead technical RCA for Sev-1/Sev-2 incidents.
• Identify systemic problems and implement permanent engineering solutions rather than tactical fixes.

Performance & Cost Optimization

• Perform Azure capacity and performance analysis.
• Identify infrastructure bottlenecks and scalability constraints.
• Optimize compute, storage, networking, and PaaS consumption.
• Drive Azure cost optimization without compromising reliability or security.
• Use Azure Advisor and platform telemetry to identify optimization opportunities.

Technical Leadership

• Act as a technical authority for Azure infrastructure and platform engineering.
• Mentor senior engineers and help raise engineering standards.
• Review architecture and technical designs.
• Challenge design assumptions and identify technical risks.
• Lead complex engineering initiatives from design through implementation.
• Collaborate with application, security, networking, SRE, DevOps, and architecture teams.
• Provide technical leadership during major incidents and high-impact infrastructure changes.
• Influence engineering decisions across teams without relying on formal management authority.

Good to Have

• Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification.
• Azure Administrator Associate certification.
• Azure Network Engineer Associate certification.
• Experience with AKS and container platforms.
• Experience with Azure Landing Zones / Enterprise Scale architecture.
• Experience with Azure Policy and governance.
• Experience with DevOps / CI/CD platforms.
• Experience with GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or similar.
• Experience with FinOps / Azure cost optimization.
• Experience with SRE practices.
• Experience operating large-scale distributed systems.

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for an engineer who demonstrates Principal-level technical depth, not simply breadth of Azure certifications.

The successful candidate should be able to:

• Take an ambiguous infrastructure problem and develop the technical solution.
• Design an Azure architecture and explain the trade-offs.
• Go deep into networking, compute, storage, identity, security, and platform services.
• Troubleshoot complex production failures end-to-end.
• Automate repetitive infrastructure and operational tasks.
• Review and improve existing architectures.
• Design for reliability, security, scalability, performance, and cost.
• Lead technical discussions with architects, engineers, and senior stakeholders.
• Mentor other engineers through technical influence.
• Remain hands-on with technology rather than operating purely at an architectural or management level.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The strongest candidates are likely to come from backgrounds such as:

• Principal Cloud Engineer
• Principal Azure Engineer
• Principal Infrastructure Engineer
• Senior/Lead Azure Infrastructure Engineer
• Cloud Platform Engineer
• Senior Cloud Architect with strong hands-on engineering experience
• Principal DevOps / SRE Engineer with deep Azure infrastructure expertise
• Azure Platform Engineer

Candidates whose experience is primarily Azure administration, basic VM provisioning, application deployment, or certification-driven cloud architecture without deep production troubleshooting would not be a strong fit.

Seniority Indicators

The candidate should demonstrate evidence of:

Architecture → Engineering → Automation → Operations → Troubleshooting → Technical Leadership

rather than only:

Certification → Service Knowledge → Administration

The role is expected to be approximately 70% technical/engineering and 30% technical leadership/architecture, with the exact balance depending on the project and organizational requirements.