Azure Cloud Engineer
Location: Charlotte, NC; Chandler, AZ; or Dallas, TX
Hybrid: 3 days onsite, 2 days remote
Duration: 12-month contract with strong potential for extension
Our client, a leading U.S.-based financial services institution, is seeking an experienced Azure Cloud Platform Engineer to support, maintain, and enhance large-scale Azure platform and application hosting environments. This role will focus on cloud operations, platform stability, application hosting, observability, automation, and continuous improvement across cloud and on-premises environments.
The ideal candidate brings strong hands-on experience with Azure, Kubernetes, Linux, infrastructure automation, monitoring and observability, and production platform support. This individual will also help drive automation, self-service capabilities, toil reduction, and operational efficiency while partnering with engineering teams, technical stakeholders, vendors, and senior leadership.
In This Role, You Will:
- Support and maintain large-scale Azure platform and application hosting environments, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure App Service Environment (ASE).
- Lead or participate in complex, broad-impact initiatives involving cloud infrastructure, platform services, systems operations, and application hosting.
- Provide L2/L3 operational support for production Azure environments and troubleshoot complex platform and infrastructure issues.
- Lead initiatives to improve observability, monitoring, alerting, platform stability, automation, and operational efficiency.
- Identify operational gaps, inefficiencies, and sources of manual effort and drive continuous improvement and toil-reduction initiatives.
- Perform incident management, root cause analysis, change management, capacity planning, platform maintenance, and day-to-day operational oversight.
- Support and troubleshoot Azure networking, identity, security, compute, and platform services.
- Work with engineering teams on technical changes, platform enhancements, and solution design while ensuring adherence to technical controls, governance standards, and enterprise architecture guidelines.
- Develop and maintain automation and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to streamline provisioning, configuration, operational support, and self-service capabilities.
- Support containerized workloads and Kubernetes platform operations.
- Review and analyze technical and operational challenges, evaluate alternatives, and implement platform improvements and corrective actions.
- Collaborate with technical peers, cross-functional teams, vendors, and mid-to-senior-level stakeholders to resolve issues and maintain high levels of systems and infrastructure availability.
- Participate in Change and Release Management processes to minimize service disruption and maintain platform stability.
- Maintain technical documentation, operational procedures, and platform support standards.
- Provide clear communication and status updates regarding incidents, platform health, operational risks, and technical initiatives.
- Help mentor and provide technical guidance to other engineers as needed.
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years of experience supporting public cloud and on-premises technologies.
- 4+ years of experience supporting Linux environments.
- 3+ years of hands-on experience with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure App Service Environment (ASE), and Azure Landing Zones.
- 3+ years of experience with Terraform and GitHub.
- 3+ years of experience with Python or comparable scripting/automation experience.
- 2+ years of experience with Grafana, KQL, and JQL.
- Experience supporting production-scale cloud and application hosting environments.
- Strong experience with incident management, change management, platform troubleshooting, and operational support.
- Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, platform stability, observability, monitoring, and automation.
- Experience reducing manual operational effort through automation and self-service capabilities.
- 1+ year of experience with LLMs, prompting, conversational AI, agentic AI, and/or MCP.
- Strong verbal, written, analytical, and interpersonal communication skills.
- Ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across engineering, operations, and business teams.
Desired Qualifications
- 3+ years of experience supporting shared hosting environments.
- 3+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).
- Experience supporting OpenShift platforms.
- Strong experience with ServiceNow for incident and change management.
- 1+ year of experience with Jira and ServiceNow.
- Experience with Azure Monitor, Prometheus, or other monitoring and observability platforms.
- Experience with Docker, Helm, or other containerization and orchestration technologies.
- Experience with Azure networking, identity, security, and enterprise cloud governance.
- Experience with Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Virtual Networks, NSGs, Private Endpoints, and Entra ID.
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation tools such as Terraform, ARM, Bicep, or Ansible.
- Familiarity with Bash and PowerShell scripting.
- Experience with capacity planning, performance optimization, and platform availability initiatives.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Preferred Certifications
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate
- Cloud Native Computing Foundation Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
Key Technology Focus
Cloud & Platform: Microsoft Azure, AKS, ASE, Azure Landing Zones, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Networking, Entra ID
Infrastructure & Automation: Terraform, GitHub, Python, ARM, Bicep, Ansible
Containers & Platforms: Kubernetes, AKS, Docker, Helm, OpenShift
Observability & Monitoring: Grafana, KQL, JQL, Azure Monitor, Prometheus
Operations: Incident Management, Change Management, ServiceNow, Jira, Root Cause Analysis, Capacity Planning, Site Reliability Engineering
AI & Automation: LLMs, Prompting, Conversational AI, Agentic AI, MCP
Work Environment
This role operates in a large-scale enterprise technology environment and requires a combination of hands-on engineering, operational ownership, automation, and strategic collaboration. The engineer will work across cloud and on-premises platforms while partnering with engineering, infrastructure, operations, vendors, and senior technical stakeholders to improve platform reliability, observability, efficiency, and availability.
Benefits
Medical Insurance – Four plans to choose from for you and your family
Dental and Orthodontia Benefits
Vision Benefits
Health Savings Account (HSA)
Health and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
Voluntary Life Insurance, Long-Term and Short-Term Disability Insurance
Hospital Indemnity Insurance
401(k) Retirement Plan
Paid Sick Time Leave
Legal and Identity Protection Plans
Pre-tax Commuter Benefit
529 College Savings Plan
Motion Recruitment Partners (MRP) is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All applicants must be currently authorized to work on a full-time basis in the country for which they are applying; no sponsorship is currently available. Employment is contingent upon successful completion of a pre-employment screening.
Accommodation will be provided throughout the hiring process as required under MRP’s Employment Accommodation Policy. Applicants are encouraged to make accommodation needs known in advance.
