Azure Devops Architect

Role Title : Azure Devops Architect

REMOTE

Required Skills :

• Strong hands-on experience with Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, and Azure Artifacts, and working knowledge of Azure Boards.

• Demonstrated ability to create and troubleshoot multi-stage YAML pipelines from scratch.

• Strong experience administering Azure Repos permissions, branch policies, pull request rules, and merge strategies.

• Hands-on experience designing and consuming reusable YAML templates across multiple repositories.

• Experience configuring and maintaining self-hosted build agents on Windows and Linux, including agent pools, toolchains, permissions, and troubleshooting.

• Strong Git knowledge, including branching, merging, rebasing, cherry-picking, tagging, conflict resolution, and history recovery.

• Proficiency in PowerShell and/or Bash for build and deployment automation.

• Practical experience with at least one major build ecosystem: .NET/MSBuild, npm/Node.js, Maven/Gradle, or Python packaging.

• Clear understanding of the end-to-end software build and release lifecycle, artifact versioning, environment promotion, deployment validation, and rollback. • Proven ability to diagnose failures across application code, pipeline configuration, dependencies, operating systems, and infrastructure.

Required Qualifications —

Certifications

 • Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert certification is required, including successful completion of AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions and the applicable prerequisite certification.

Preferred Skills :

• Experience with Docker-based builds and container registries such as Azure Container Registry.

• Experience with workload identity federation and managed identities for secure pipeline authentication.

• Hands-on experience integrating SonarQube with Azure Pipelines and Azure Repos pull requests, including automated code analysis, pull request decoration, and enforcement of quality gates through required PR status checks and branch policies.

• Experience supporting macOS build agents, if required by the application portfolio.

• Experience maintaining classic Azure DevOps release pipelines and migrating them to multi-stage YAML pipelines.

Responsibilities : Azure Repos Administration and Source Control

• Administer Azure Repos repositories, repository permissions, branch security, and access controls.

• Define and maintain branching strategies, repository standards, and pull request workflows appropriate to the team’s delivery model.

• Configure and enforce branch policies, including o Minimum reviewer requirements and automatically included reviewers. o Pull request build validation and required status checks. o Comment resolution and linked work item requirements. o Permitted merge strategies and restrictions on direct pushes. o Controlled permissions to bypass policies.

• Manage pull request completion practices, including squash merges, merge commits, and rebase-based workflows.

• Resolve complex merge conflicts and troubleshoot Git history, tagging, and repository issues.

• Establish commit, tagging, and versioning standards; manage large files and repository maintenance where needed. Azure Pipelines and Reusable Templates • Design and create YAML-based CI/CD pipelines from scratch and maintain existing pipelines.

• Implement multi-stage pipelines covering build, test, package, publish, and deployment activities.

• Design and maintain reusable stage, job, and step templates to standardize pipelines across repositories.

• Use template parameters, variables, variable groups, conditions, dependencies, and output variables appropriately.

• Manage shared template repositories, template versioning, and controlled rollout of template changes.

• Configure CI triggers, branch and path filters, scheduled runs, pipeline-resource triggers, and Azure Repos PR build validation policies.

• Configure and securely manage pipeline access to repositories, service connections, variable groups, and other protected resources. Cross-Platform Build Agents

• Configure and administer Microsoft-hosted and self-hosted build agents and agent pools.

• Install, register, configure, and maintain self-hosted agents on Windows and Linux; support macOS where required.

• Provision and maintain SDKs, compilers, package managers, build tools, and other agent dependencies.

• Configure agent capabilities and demands, service accounts, permissions, and network access.

• Troubleshoot agent availability, toolchain incompatibilities, workspace contamination, connectivity, and platform-specific build failures.

• Maintain consistent build environments and appropriate isolation between workloads. Build Automation and Artifact Management

• Automate source checkout, dependency restore, compilation, unit testing, static analysis, code coverage, packaging, and artifact publication.

• Support the organization’s application build ecosystems, such as .NET/MSBuild, npm/Node.js, Maven/Gradle, or Python.

• Configure and administer Azure Artifacts feeds, package permissions, upstream sources, retention, and package versioning.

• Manage pipeline artifacts and package feeds appropriately for their respective purposes.

• Improve build performance through caching, parallel execution, incremental builds, and agent optimization.

• Diagnose failed builds, flaky tests, dependency issues, and differences between developer and CI environments. Release and Deployment Management

• Build and maintain deployment stages using Azure Pipelines and Azure DevOps Environments.

• Configure approvals, checks, deployment conditions, and environment-specific configuration.

• Promote the same versioned artifacts across development, test, staging, and production rather than rebuilding for each environment.

• Collaborate with application and platform teams on deployment validation, rollback procedures, and release troubleshooting.

• Maintain release documentation and traceability between source commits, builds, artifacts, and deployments. Security, Traceability, and Continuous Improvement

• Apply least-privilege access to repositories, pipelines, agent pools, feeds, service connections, and environments.

• Protect secrets and use approved authentication methods, including workload identity federation or managed identities where supported.

• Use Azure Boards work item links to support traceability from requirements and changes through pull requests, builds, and releases.

• Monitor build success rates, execution times, queue times, and recurring failures; implement measurable improvements.

• Document standards and provide guidance to developers on Git workflows, pull requests, pipeline templates, and build troubleshooting.

Expected Deliverable(s) : You will work closely with development, QA, platform, and release teams to deliver reliable, repeatable, secure, and traceable software releases.