AVP Cloud & Infrastructure Engineering (Azure)

15-20+ Years Exp required:

Seeking a hands-on Cloud & Infrastructure leader with deep Azure expertise, Terraform-based automation, DevSecOps, cloud security, and team leadership experience, capable of evolving into an executive role.

AVP, Cloud & Infrastructure

The AVP, Cloud & Infrastructure leads a modern, agile infrastructure organization responsible for the design, build, and continuous improvement of all cloud-based infrastructure and platform services. This role encompasses the full spectrum of infrastructure engineering including storage, networking, security, DevSecOps, data infrastructure, and observability, and ensures our cloud environments are secure, reliable, cost-effective, and high performing.

Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, this leader defines strategy and execution for the company's cloud-first model, primarily within Azure with strategic awareness of AWS and Google Cloud Platform. The leader will oversee infrastructure architecture, automation, developer enablement, and site reliability engineering. The leader will foster innovation, accountability, and operational excellence across the team and collaborate closely with software engineering, data, operations, and security functions to design and deliver resilient and scalable solutions.

The position demands both strategic leadership and deep technical capability. The ideal candidate balances vision and detail, guiding a distributed team of engineers and MSP partners to build a best-in-class infrastructure foundation for the enterprise.

Responsibilities & Accountabilities

• Develop and maintain the cloud and infrastructure strategy, focusing on scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Lead development, review, and maintenance of engineering standards.
• Lead design and implementation of cloud-native architectures using Terraform for IaC, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, and automated quality/testing frameworks.
• Own end-to-end infrastructure engineering and operations for compute, network, storage, and platform services across Azure and supporting cloud tools.
• Manage cloud subscription structures, ensuring optimized cost, governance, and resource allocation. Establish and mature FinOps practices.
• Architect and maintain cloud networking including VNets, ExpressRoute, firewalls, DNS, VPNs, and connectivity with partners and vendors.
• Drive cloud security posture management and IAM integration (e.g., Azure Entra ID and Okta), enforcing least privilege, zero trust network architecture, guardrails, and continuous compliance. Ensure proper integration with security tooling.
• Oversee observability, SRE practices, and tooling, including monitoring, metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and SLA adherence. Ensure L1/L2 operational support and L3 engineering support.
• Build and govern developer enablement platforms and golden paths, providing reusable IaC modules, Spacelift products, and templates to accelerate delivery.
• Partner with data teams to define infrastructure for data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, CDC, Kafka/EventHub, RDBMS, NoSQL), ensuring performance, availability, cost, and security alignment.
• Partner with software teams to define infrastructure to support software delivery (e.g., AKS, Functions, App Services, Blob Store) ensuring performance, availability, cost, and security alignment.
• Design and test disaster recovery and business continuity plans to meet defined RTO/RPO objectives.
• Mentor and develop a team of engineers and contractors, cultivating technical growth, ownership, and a culture of collaboration and excellence.
• Collaborate with enterprise architects, software leaders, ITSM and desktop staff, and security teams to align infrastructure roadmaps with broader technology strategy.
• Manage configuration management, automation tooling, and infrastructure code repositories for reusability and standardization.
• Participate in ITSM processes (incident, problem, change, and service requests).
• Maintain comprehensive documentation for architectures, standards, and processes.
• Stay current on emerging cloud and infrastructure technologies and introduce innovations that improve performance, resilience, and cost control.
• Identify opportunities for improvement in current technology and that of individual systems. Avoid the creation of tech debt, identify tech debt quickly, and prioritize the swift remediation of technical debt. Support CMDB, app portfolio, and other key inventory capabilities.

Required Qualifications:

• 12+ years in infrastructure or cloud engineering leadership, with extensive experience in Azure and working knowledge of AWS.

• Proven ability to lead teams in designing, automating, and operating enterprise-grade cloud environments.
• Strong expertise in Azure services (VNets, LB/AppGW, ExpressRoute, VM, Functions, Blob, AKS, Entra, Scale Sets, SQL, DNS, ASB/EventHubs, ADF), infrastructure as code (IaC) tools (Terraform), and CI/CD tools and DevSecOps practices (Github Actions).
• Demonstrated experience with security controls, IAM, and privileged access management.
• Familiarity with observability tooling (Azure Monitor, DataDog, etc.) and SRE principles.
• Solid understanding of networking, containerization, and DR/BC in cloud environments.
• Experience managing cloud cost optimization, FinOps, and vendor relationships.
• Exceptional communication and collaboration; proven success leading cross-functional teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or related field, or 10 years equivalent work experience in technology architecture, software development, infrastructure engineering, cloud engineering, or similar roles.
• Strong expertise in AWS services (VPC, ELB NLB/ALB, Direct Connect, EC2, Lambda, S3, EKS, IAM, Auto Scaling, RDS, Route 53, Kinesis/MSK/SQS, Glue).
• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid integrations and regulated environments (insurance, financial services, healthcare, etc.).
• Strong presentation and consultative skills to convey complex technical ideas to non-technical audiences.
• Deep familiarity with DevSecOps, automation frameworks, and microservice-based architectures.
• Experience with one or more programming languages (TypeScript, Python, Java/C#, SQ
  L, etc.).

Key Success Measures:

• Accelerated delivery of secure, automated, and repeatable infrastructure environments.
• Reduction in cloud costs through optimized design and FinOps maturity.
• Measurable improvements in reliability (uptime, latency, and incident metrics).
• Increased automation coverage, IaC compliance, and documentation completeness.
• Strong team engagement, retention, and collaboration across domains.