Azure Cloud Architect

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Azure Cloud Architect with 10+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, enterprise architecture, and Azure platform engineering. The role requires strong hands-on experience designing and implementing Azure infrastructure, with the ability to lead architecture discussions and present technical solutions to clients.

The ideal candidate has practical implementation experience with Azure Landing Zones, Azure networking, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), security, identity, high availability, disaster recovery, monitoring, DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code. Strong hands-on experience with Azure Bicep and ARM templates is required. Terraform knowledge is useful but must not be the sole Infrastructure as Code experience.

Key Responsibilities

Design enterprise Azure infrastructure aligned with Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and Azure Well-Architected principles.

Design and review Azure Landing Zones including management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, governance, RBAC, Azure Policy, and tagging standards.

Design Azure networking using Azure Virtual WAN, Virtual Hubs, Hub-Spoke architecture, VNets, subnetting, NSGs, route tables, Private Link, Private Endpoints, Private DNS, ExpressRoute, VPN, BGP, and NAT Gateway.

Architect secure and scalable AKS environments including private AKS, Azure CNI Overlay, system and user node pools, autoscaling, Kubernetes networking, namespace isolation, workload identity, managed identity, ingress, and multi-region deployment patterns.

Design high availability and disaster recovery architectures across Azure regions and availability zones, including RTO, RPO, backup, replication, and failover strategies.

Design security architecture using Microsoft Entra ID, Managed Identity, Workload Identity, RBAC, PIM, Conditional Access, Key Vault, Defender for Cloud, Azure Policy, private networking, and zero-trust principles.

Design secure ingress and egress patterns using Application Gateway, API Management, WAF, DDoS protection, private networking, and NAT.

Design Azure data and storage components including Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server and Azure Blob Storage, with appropriate availability, replication, backup, and recovery patterns.

Design and implement monitoring and observability using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, and integration with enterprise security monitoring platforms.

Design and review private Azure Container Registry deployments, image security, and regional resiliency patterns.

Drive FinOps architecture practices including resource tagging, AKS namespace-level cost allocation, chargeback/showback, resource sizing, and cost optimization.

Work with engineering and DevOps teams to translate architecture into implementable infrastructure and deployment patterns.

Review technical implementation against approved HLD, LLD, security, networking, and governance requirements.

Infrastructure as Code and DevOps

Strong hands-on implementation experience is required. The candidate must have previously designed, developed, maintained, and deployed Azure infrastructure using:

Azure Bicep for reusable and modular Infrastructure as Code.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, including parameterized templates and deployment automation.

Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application deployment.

Workload Identity Federation and managed identities for secure pipeline authentication.

Infrastructure deployment validation, parameter management, environment promotion, and deployment governance.

Terraform is considered an additional skill. Candidates whose IaC experience is limited to Terraform without hands-on Bicep and ARM template experience are not the target profile.

Requirements

Required Technical Skills

10+ years of experience in IT infrastructure, cloud engineering, solution architecture, or cloud architecture.

5+ years of hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure enterprise environments.

Strong Azure infrastructure architecture and implementation experience.

Strong knowledge of Azure networking and hybrid connectivity.

Hands-on Azure Kubernetes Service architecture and implementation experience.

Hands-on Bicep and ARM template development and deployment experience.

Strong understanding of Azure security, identity, governance, and zero-trust architecture.

Experience with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, and operational mon…