Azure Platform Engineer/Lead

Role Overview: The Azure Platform Engineer/Lead is an experienced Azure engineering professional with

7–9+ years of hands-on expertise in platform automation (Terraform, PowerShell), resource deployment through GitHub/Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, and disciplined platform governance. This role leads technical initiatives, guides teams on solution design and deployment feasibility, and partners with application teams to translate business requirements into scalable, secure Azure solutions. The engineer is accountable for Azure platform health, incident response maturity, technical debt reduction, and ensuring high availability across regions and availability zones.

Key Responsibilities 1. Leadership, Strategy & Governance

• Lead and mentor a team of Azure cloud engineers, platform engineers, and automation specialists.
• Define and execute the Azure platform strategy, roadmap, and modernization initiatives aligned with business objectives.
• Drive adoption of Azure best practices, governance standards, security controls, and operational excellence across the organization.
• Establish and maintain platform engineering principles, self-service capabilities, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) standards.
• Collaborate with Architecture, Security, DevOps, AI, Product, and Business teams to enable cloud-native solutions and digital transformation.
• Develop team capabilities through coaching, training, career development, and succession planning.
• Manage vendor relationships and collaborate with Microsoft and strategic partners on platform improvements and support.

2. Platform Automation & Deployment

• Design, automate, and deploy Azure resources using CI/CD pipelines, including GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps.
• Lead technical solution design discussions and validate deployment feasibility.
• Partner with application teams to understand requirements and deliver scalable, secure, and resilient Azure solutions.
• Maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) using Terraform, ARM/Bicep, PowerShell, and Azure CLI.
• Drive automation initiatives to improve deployment speed, operational efficiency, consistency, and service quality.

3. Backlog Management & Platform Governance

• Prioritize backlog items, feature requests, and platform enhancements using Azure Boards or Jira.
• Ensure compliance with Azure governance standards, including Azure Policies, RBAC, tagging strategies, security baselines, and compliance requirements.
• Maintain and reduce technical debt across Azure environments.
• Establish and track platform KPIs, service metrics, operational health, and roadmap progress.

4. Operations, Support & Incident Management

• Lead cloud platform operations, ensuring availability, reliability, performance, scalability, and compliance.
• Provide L3/L4 support during major incidents and lead root cause analysis (RCA) and remediation efforts.
• Troubleshoot complex issues across compute, networking, identity, security, storage, containers, and application integrations.
• Manage major incidents, escalations, and stakeholder communications.
• Continuously improve operational processes, runbooks, monitoring, and automation capabilities.

5. Azure Resiliency, High Availability & Disaster Recovery

• Ensure resiliency, high availability, and disaster recovery readiness across Azure workloads.
• Design fault-tolerant architectures spanning multiple regions and availability zones.
• Oversee capacity planning, disaster recovery, resiliency, and business continuity strategies.
• Proactively identify and address infrastructure bottlenecks to improve platform stability and reliability.

6. Financial Management & Optimization

• Partner with FinOps teams to optimize Azure consumption, budgets, reservations, savings plans, and cloud cost management.
• Drive cost optimization initiatives while maintaining performance, scalability, and business requirements.
• Support forecasting, budgeting, and cloud financial governance activities.

Key Leadership Focus Areas

• People Leadership & Talent Development
• Azure Platform Strategy & Roadmap
• Cloud Governance & Security
• Platform Engineering & Automation
• Operational Excellence & Reliability
• FinOps & Cost Optimization
• Stakeholder & Vendor Management
• Cloud Modernization & Innovation
• Service Delivery & Continuous Improvement EoE