Senior Azure Infrastructure Operations Lead / Remote / Need W2.

Job Title: Senior Azure Infrastructure Operations Lead

Location : Remote

can do either contract or fulltime.

Position Overview

The Senior Azure Infrastructure Operations Lead is responsible for leading the design, implementation, optimization, and operational excellence of Microsoft Azure based infrastructure. This role oversees day to day cloud operations, ensures platform reliability, drives automation-first principles, and leads a high performing team of cloud engineers. The ideal candidate has extensive Azure infrastructure experience, strong leadership capabilities, and a deep understanding of cloud governance, DevOps, and modern SRE practices.

Key Responsibilities

Azure Infrastructure & Operations Leadership

• Lead end-to-end operations of Azure infrastructure across compute, storage, networking, identity, monitoring, and security.
• Responsible for Azure operational readiness, high availability, capacity planning, and cost optimization.
• Ensure robust CI/CD processes, infrastructure automation, and cloud-native operational tooling.
• Collaborate with Azure operations team (L2/L3 engineers, cloud admins, SREs, DevOps engineers).
• Drive a culture of continuous improvement, operational excellence, and automation-first mindset.
• Provide technical leadership and architectural input for cloud projects and migrations.

Cloud Governance, Security & Compliance

• Implement and enforce Azure governance, RBAC, policies, landing zones, and guardrails.
• Partner with Security to ensure alignment with organizational security frameworks and controls (Zero Trust, IAM governance, network segmentation).
• Maintain compliance with industry standards (SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA, etc., depending on organization).

Automation & Reliability Engineering

• Drive infrastructure-as-code (IaC) strategy using Bicep, Terraform, or ARM.
• Enhance platform reliability through SRE practices-monitoring, automation, self-healing workflows.
• Build automated operational processes for provisioning, patching, backup, scaling, and workload management.

Incident, Problem & Change Management

• Act as escalation point for critical infrastructure issues and lead root-cause analysis.
• Establish mature incident response processes and ensure rapid resolution of outages.
• Oversee change management across cloud environments, ensuring quality and risk control.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with architecture, development, security, and product teams to align on cloud strategy.
• Provide operational input into cloud roadmaps and modernization initiatives.
• Communicate with executive leadership regarding cloud performance, risk, and cost.

Cost Management

• Optimize Azure consumption, implement FinOps practices, and maintain efficient cost reporting.
• Track budgets, forecast cloud spend, and identify opportunities to reduce waste.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 12 to 15+ years of IT infrastructure experience, with at least 5+ years focused on Azure.
• Expertise in Azure IaaS, PaaS, VNet design, load balancing, App Services, AKS, Storage, AAD, and Azure Monitor.
• Strong experience with scripting and automation (PowerShell, Python, Bash, CLI).
• Proven leadership experience managing cloud operations teams.
• Hands-on experience with IaC tools (Terraform, Bicep, ARM).
• Solid understanding of networking (DNS, VPN, ExpressRoute, firewalls).
• Familiarity with DevOps pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins).
• Strong knowledge of monitoring, logging, observability, and alerting frameworks.
• Experience driving cloud governance and security best practices.

Preferred Qualifications

• Microsoft Azure certifications (e.g., AZ 104, AZ 305, AZ 400, AZ 500).
• Experience in large-scale cloud migrations.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes (AKS) or containerized infrastructure.
• Experience in regulated or enterprise environments.
• Experience of ITIL and SRE frameworks.