Job Description Azure Cloud Engineer
Location: Fully Remote – Romania
Contract Type: 12-month contract, extendable
Engagement Stage: Proof of Concept (POC)
Role: Cloud Architect, Platform Engineering & Operations
Position Summary
We are seeking an experienced Azure Cloud Platform Engineering & Operations to support a proof-of-concept initiative focused on designing and validating an enterprise-scale Azure cloud platform. This fully remote role will help establish secure, scalable, and repeatable platform foundations that improve developer experience, operational reliability, governance, and cost efficiency.
The successful candidate will combine deep Azure expertise with practical platform engineering, automation, security, and operational experience. This is an opportunity to shape the initial architecture and demonstrate the value of standardized cloud platform capabilities before broader enterprise adoption.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and validate the target architecture, reference patterns, standards, and technical approach for the Azure platform during the POC.
- Design and implement an initial Azure Landing Zone aligned with the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework.
- Build reusable, secure, and self-service platform capabilities for identity, networking, compute, containers, storage, monitoring, secrets, backup, and shared services.
- Establish secure connectivity patterns, including hub-and-spoke networking, private endpoints, DNS, routing, firewalling, load balancing, and Application Gateway/WAF where relevant.
- Implement Infrastructure as Code and policy-as-code using tools such as Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates, PowerShell, and Azure CLI.
- Define CI/CD, GitOps, testing, versioning, promotion, and rollback standards for platform services.
- Embed governance and security controls using Azure Policy, Management Groups, RBAC, Microsoft Entra ID, Privileged Identity Management, and Key Vault.
- Establish observability practices across Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, dashboards, alerting, and operational telemetry.
- Support reliability and operational readiness through service ownership, runbooks, support models, capacity planning, backup, disaster recovery, and resilience testing.
- Collaborate with infrastructure, security, application, and business stakeholders to gather requirements, validate designs, and demonstrate POC outcomes.
- Document architecture decisions, platform patterns, deployment procedures, and recommendations for scaling beyond the POC.
- Provide technical guidance and mentorship to cloud engineers and delivery teams.
Required Experience
- 10+ years of experience across infrastructure, cloud engineering, platform engineering, or technology operations.
- 7+ years of hands-on Microsoft Azure experience, including enterprise-scale environments.
- 5+ years of cloud or platform architecture experience, with accountability for standards, technical decisions, and governance.
- Proven experience designing or implementing Azure Landing Zones, subscription structures, and shared platform services.
- Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, automated validation, and reusable module design.
- Practical experience with Azure networking, identity, security, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, and high availability.
- Experience applying SRE principles, including SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, incident management, and operational readiness.
- Experience with FinOps practices, including tagging, cost visibility, budgets, allocation, and optimization.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical and business stakeholders in a remote environment.
Technical Skills
- Azure Landing Zones and subscription vending
- Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates, PowerShell, and Azure CLI
- Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
- Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, and Microsoft Sentinel
- Azure Policy, Management Groups, RBAC, Entra ID, PIM, and Key Vault
- Azure networking, private connectivity, DNS, routing, and traffic management
- Azure Backup, Site Recovery, Update Manager, Advisor, and Cost Management
- Windows Server, Linux, Active Directory/Entra ID, VMware, storage, and disaster recovery
- IT service management and configuration-management practices
Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
- Relevant certifications such as:
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305)
- Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104)
- Azure Network Engineer Associate (AZ-700)
- Azure Security Engineer Associate (AZ-500)
- HashiCorp Terraform Associate
- TOGAF
- ITIL Foundation
Success in the POC
- A validated Azure platform architecture and Landing Zone approach.
- Reusable infrastructure and policy-as-code patterns demonstrated through working automation.
- Clear security, governance, networking, and observability foundations.
- Improved speed, consistency, and repeatability for provisioning and onboarding workloads.
- Practical recommendations, documentation, and a roadmap for extending the platform beyond the POC.
Darwin Recruitment is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.
Radheen Naiker