Immediate Opening Azure DevOps SRE

Role Summary

We are hiring Junior Azure DevOps SRE Engineers to join a dedicated weekday support engagement for a large enterprise customer, working embedded alongside the customer's project engineering team. You will own day-to-day CI/CD pipeline maintenance, support their release cadence end to end, and make the infrastructure and configuration changes needed to move a release from the lowest environment through to production. You will also provide escalation-tier support on production issues engaged after the customer's front-line support, alongside their engineering team.

This is a structured role for an engineer early in their DevOps/SRE career. You will start with a full month of knowledge transfer, then move through shadowing, guided execution, and independent ownership over the first year with a senior Azure DevOps SRE Engineer on the engagement and KnackForge's DevOps practice behind you.

Key Responsibilities

CI/CD Pipeline Maintenance & Ownership

• Maintain and operate existing CI/CD pipelines keeping builds green, triaging failures, and fixing broken stages.
• Handle build-server upkeep, including security patching and routine maintenance.
• Manage build/agent cost and capacity shutting down and restarting resources as needed.
• Create new pipelines for new projects using established patterns and templates.
• Adopt new or upgraded tooling as the customer's toolchain evolves.

Release Engineering Support

• Support the customer's release cadence daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, or quarterly, as required.
• Create and update infrastructure, application configuration, and related changes needed to promote a release from the lowest environment through to production deployment.
• Validate deployments, confirm environment health post-release, and support rollback where needed.

Escalation-Tier Production Support

• Engage on production issues when escalated beyond the customer's front-line (L0/L1) support working alongside their engineering team and, where needed, Microsoft support.
• Acknowledge and begin analysis within shift hours against severity-based targets: Severity 1 within 30 minutes, Severity 2 within 2 hours, Severity 3 by next business day.
• Pull and interpret logs, metrics, and monitoring data to narrow down the cause of an issue.
• Contribute written issue analysis notes or RCA inputs within five business days of incident closure for Severity 1 and Severity 2 issues you worked on.

Delivery Discipline

• Execute day-to-day tasks assigned by the customer's project engineering team and report progress on the agreed cadence.
• Meet sprint commitments the engagement targets 90%+ completion of assigned tasks within the committed sprint or cycle.
• Contribute to weekly status reporting and the monthly delivery summary.
• Keep pipeline documentation, runbooks, and deployment notes current so knowledge stays with the team.

Required Skills & Experience

• 12 years of hands-on experience in DevOps, cloud operations, build/release engineering, or a similar engineering role.
• Working knowledge of Microsoft Azure — compute, storage, resource groups, and the portal/CLI. You should be comfortable navigating a live Azure subscription.
• Exposure to CI/CD pipelines — has worked with GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Jenkins, or GitLab CI, and can read and modify pipeline YAML.
• Git fundamentals — branching, pull requests, merge conflict resolution, and release tagging.
• Scripting ability in PowerShell, Bash, or Python — enough to automate a routine task end to end.
• Linux and Windows Server basics — navigating a server, checking services, reading logs, and basic troubleshooting.
• Awareness of containers — Docker concepts and what Kubernetes/AKS does, even if production experience is limited.
• Ability to read logs and monitoring data to investigate a failure, and the instinct to check evidence before guessing.
• Structured troubleshooting and clear escalation judgement — knowing when to dig in and when to pull in senior help.
• Clear written English — you will write status updates, issue analysis notes, and documentation read by the customer's engineering team.
• Willingness and ability to work the 9:00 PM – 6:00 AM IST shift from our Chennai office on a sustained basis, Monday to Friday.

Good to Have

Familiarity with the tooling used on this engagement is an advantage. Equivalent experience on comparable platforms is acceptable — we care that you have worked with tooling of this shape, not that you have used these exact products.

• GitHub Actions as the delivery pipeline — or equivalent (Azure Pipelines, GitLab CI, Jenkins).
• Azure Monitor and Application Insights for platform and application telemetry — or equivalent monitoring/APM tooling.
• ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) for log search and analysis — or equivalent (Splunk, Grafana Loki, Azure Log Analytics).
• JIRA for task and incident tracking — or equivalent (Azure Boards, ServiceNow).
• Confluence for runbooks and documentation — or equivalent.
• Terraform or any Infrastructure as Code exposure — even sandbox or coursework level.
• Basic understanding of Azure networking and identity (VNet/NSG, Entra ID) and secrets handling via Key Vault.
• Any prior experience working directly with an overseas customer team or on a night-shift support engagement.

Certifications

• AZ-900: Azure Fundamentals — expected at or shortly after joining.
• AZ-104: Azure Administrator Associate—preferred, or to be completed during the engagement with our support.
• AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions — a growth target, not an entry requirement.

What This Role Offers

• Direct, daily working exposure to a large enterprise engineering team and a mature Azure estate — the fastest way to build real DevOps judgement early in a career.
• A defined 12-month progression path from knowledge transfer to full ownership, with a senior Azure DevOps SRE Engineer on the same engagement.
• Certification support along the AZ-900 AZ-104 AZ-400 path.
• Weekday-only schedule with weekends and India-observed holidays off.
• On-site collaboration from our Chennai office — you sit with the wider DevOps practice rather than working alone from home on a night shift.