Cloud Infrastructure Manager

About Our Team

We are seeking an experienced, hands-on Cloud Infrastructure Manager to lead the team responsible for the secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective operation of Qira’s multi-region Azure AI platform.

This role owns platform architecture, production reliability, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and delivery infrastructure across Azure Front Door, Application Gateway, Azure Container Apps, Microsoft Foundry, Azure API Management, and GitHub Actions.

The successful candidate combines deep Azure expertise with strong people leadership and operational accountability. Working across application development, AI engineering, data, security, and business teams, this leader will translate business requirements into resilient infrastructure, controlled releases, and measurable service outcomes.

Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid; 3 days onsite, 2 days remote)

What You'll Do

Platform Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, coach, and develop the cloud platform team while maintaining hands-on technical leadership and sustainable support coverage.
• Own the platform roadmap, delivery priorities, operational risks, vendor relationships, and escalation paths.
• Establish clear service ownership and accountability across development, AI engineering, data, and security teams.

Multi-Region Infrastructure & Disaster Recovery

• Design and operate resilient multi-region Azure environments using appropriate active-active and active-passive patterns, availability zones, and dependency-aware routing.
• Define and manage service-level objectives, recovery time objectives (RTO), and recovery point objectives (RPO).
• Maintain and test regional failover, failback, backup, and recovery processes across PostgreSQL, Redis, storage, containers, configuration, and AI services.

Networking & AI Platform Operations

• Manage Azure Front Door, Application Gateway, WAF policies, DNS, TLS, virtual networks, private endpoints, firewalls, egress controls, and hybrid connectivity.
• Oversee Microsoft Foundry resources, model deployments, access controls, private connectivity, model lifecycle, capacity, quotas, and regional availability.
• Partner with AI engineering and security on controlled model rollouts, content safety, prompt-injection and data-exfiltration protections, and secure access to AI tools and data.

API, Containers & Platform Delivery

• Own Azure API Management configuration and governance, including authentication, authorization, versioning, tenant isolation, routing, throttling, load balancing, and observability.
• Operate Azure Container Apps, including workload profiles, scaling, health probes, managed identities, zone redundancy, traffic splitting, and rollback.
• Maintain reusable Infrastructure as Code and Policy as Code, automated validation, configuration-drift detection, and staged multi-region deployments.

GitHub Actions & CI/CD

• Own secure self-hosted GitHub Actions runners in Azure, including provisioning, autoscaling, patching, isolation, capacity, logging, and queue monitoring.
• Apply least-privilege access, OIDC workload federation, protected production environments, workflow controls, and secure artifact management.
• Maintain reliable deployment and recovery paths during regional outages.

Reliability, Security & Governance

• Establish actionable monitoring, alerting, synthetic testing, distributed tracing, and service dashboards using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, and KQL.
• Track platform availability, latency, AI model performance, throttling, regional capacity, and infrastructure health.
• Lead incident response, escalation, stakeholder communication, post-incident reviews, and corrective actions.
• Implement Zero Trust principles using Microsoft Entra ID, managed identities, RBAC, Azure Policy, Key Vault, Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Sentinel.
• Support applicable data residency, retention, privacy, and compliance requirements in partnership with legal and security teams.

Financial & Capacity Management

• Own cloud infrastructure budgets, demand forecasting, capacity planning, cost allocation, and optimization.
• Balance AI inference capacity, regional recovery headroom, infrastructure performance, and cost against business demand and service objectives.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of relevant cloud infrastructure or platform engineering experience, including significant hands-on Azure production operations.
• People leadership experience, and experience with cross-functional delivery, incident management, and operational ownership of business-critical, multi-region services.
• Production experience with Azure Front Door, Application Gateway, Container Apps, API Management, and Microsoft Foundry or related Azure AI model-serving services.
• Experience with GitHub Actions and secure self-hosted runners in Azure, including workload federation, runner isolation, and deployment controls.
• Experience with Azure networking, identity, security, observability, and KQL skills, with practical knowledge of PostgreSQL and Redis.
• Experience with Terraform, Bicep, or comparable Infrastructure as Code tooling, Policy as Code, Git-based change control, CI/CD, and automated testing.
• Experience assessing PowerShell, Node.js, Python, and Java applications for cloud deployment, scalability, supportability, and security.
• Experience with vendor management, automation, capacity planning, and cloud cost optimization.

Preferred Qualifications

• Relevant Azure architecture, administration, security, or DevOps certifications.
• Additional cloud-provider or multi-cloud experience.
• Chinese and/or Portuguese language skills.

The base salary budgeted range for this position is $185K - $210K. Individuals may also be considered for bonus and/or commission.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any federal, state, or local protected class.