Senior Azure DevOps Engineer

What We Are Looking For • An Azure-focused DevOps / Cloud Platform Engineer who can assess the current Azure landscape and propose a practical improvement roadmap. • A candidate who can independently investigate cost drivers and suggest safe optimization measures for production and non-production resources. • A person who can design and implement repeatable deployment processes for new projects using Infrastructure as Code and Azure DevOps pipelines. • A practical engineer who balances automation, security, maintainability, and cost, without over-engineering small projects. • A strong communicator who can work with developers, tech leads, QA, and management to clarify environment, release, and infrastructure needs. • A person who can document deployment processes, operational runbooks, and infrastructure decisions clearly enough for the internal team to maintain them. Main Responsibilities 1 Azure Cost Optimization • Analyze Azure subscription/resource costs across production, UAT, test, development, and shared resources. • Identify unused, oversized, duplicated, or incorrectly configured resources. • Propose cost-saving options such as right-sizing, scaling rules, schedules for non-production resources, reserved capacity, cleanup of unused resources, storage tiering, database optimization, and monitoring of expensive services. • Prepare cost reports and recommendations with business impact, risk level, estimated savings, and implementation effort. • Implement approved optimization changes safely, with rollback considerations and production impact assessment. • Set up cost alerts, budgets, tagging strategy, and ownership visibility for future governance. 2 Infrastructure as Code and Environment Provisioning • Design and implement Infrastructure as Code for new projects, preferably using Azure Bicep. Terraform experience is also useful, but Azure-native Bicep is preferred unless another approach is justified. • Create reusable IaC modules for common Azure patterns: App Service, Function App, Storage Account, Azure SQL, Key Vault, Application Insights, Service Bus, networking, and access policies/RBAC. • Define repeatable deployment patterns for dev, test, UAT, and production environments. • Reduce manual resource creation in Azure Portal and document exceptions when manual steps are unavoidable. • Implement parameterized environment configuration with clear separation between code, infrastructure, and secrets. • Introduce infrastructure review and approval flow before production changes. 3 CI/CD and Release Automation • Review existing Azure DevOps pipelines for build reliability, maintainability, speed, security, and release safety. • Create or improve YAML pipelines for .NET backend services, Azure Functions, Vue.js frontends, WebJobs, database deployments, and infrastructure deployments. • Implement environment-specific deployment stages with approvals, variables, artifacts, rollback notes, and deployment history. • Improve pipeline reuse using templates, shared steps, variable groups, service connections, and secure secret references. • Support deployment strategies such as slots, staged releases, blue/green or canary-style approaches where they are practical for the client projects. • Ensure CI/CD pipelines are understandable for developers and not dependent on hidden manual steps. 4 Security, Secrets, and Governance • Move sensitive settings toward Azure Key Vault and secure variable management. • Use managed identities where possible instead of long-lived credentials or connection strings stored in plain configuration. • Review Azure RBAC, service principals, service connections, access policies, and least-privilege access. • Review network exposure and recommend secure patterns such as private endpoints, access restrictions, IP rules, VNets, NSGs, and secure App Service configuration where appropriate. • Apply security checks to pipelines and infrastructure definitions where feasible. • Help define secure conventions for naming, tagging, resource groups, environment separation, and production access. 5 Monitoring, Reliability, and Operational Support • Review and improve Application Insights, Log Analytics, Azure Monitor, alerts, dashboards, and diagnostic settings. • Define practical alerting for production systems: availability, error rate, failed jobs, queue length, database issues, integration failures, high cost anomalies, and resource health. • Prepare operational runbooks for common incidents, deployment failures, rollback, and environment recovery. • Support developers with troubleshooting Azure App Services, Functions, WebJobs, queues, storage, networking, and database connectivity issues. • Help establish backup, retention, disaster recovery, and environment restore expectations where needed. Required Technical Skills 1 Azure Platform • Strong practical experience with Microsoft Azure production environments. • Azure App Service, deployment slots, app settings, scaling, access restrictions, and diagnostics. • Azure Functions, WebJobs, queues, timers, and background processing patterns. • Azure SQL Database, backup/restore basics, performance tiers, elastic pools or cost options where applicable. • Azure Storage: Blob, Queue, Table, lifecycle management, access keys, SAS, managed identities, and secure access patterns. • Azure Key Vault, managed identities, RBAC, service principals, and secure configuration management. • Application Insights, Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, diagnostic settings, alerts, and dashboards. 2 Azure DevOps and CI/CD • Strong Azure DevOps Pipelines experience, preferably YAML-based. • Build and release pipelines for .NET applications, Azure Functions, frontend applications, and database projects. • Pipeline templates, variables, variable groups, secure files, service connections, environments, approvals, and artifacts. • Git / Azure Repos workflows, branch policies, pull requests, build validation, and release gates. • Ability to simplify fragile pipelines and document how they work. 3 Infrastructure as Code • Strong Infrastructure as Code understanding. • Hands-on Azure Bicep experience is preferred. • Terraform experience is a strong plus, especially if the candidate can compare trade-offs with Bicep. • Ability to structure reusable modules, parameters, outputs, environment files, and naming conventions. • Ability to integrate IaC deployments into Azure DevOps pipelines. • Understanding of drift, idempotency, approvals, what-if validation, and safe production deployment practices. 4 Security and Compliance • Least-privilege access design for developers, pipelines, applications, and support users. • Secrets management using Key Vault and secure pipeline variable handling. • Managed identities and service principal lifecycle awareness. • Secure networking basics: private endpoints, firewalls, access restrictions, VNets, subnets, NSGs, and DNS considerations. • Awareness of Azure Defender / Microsoft Defender for Cloud, security recommendations, and vulnerability management is useful. 5 Cost Management • Experience with Azure Cost Management, budgets, cost alerts, tags, reservations, scaling, SKU right-sizing, and storage lifecycle policies. • Ability to explain cost recommendations in business terms: expected saving, risk, implementation effort, and operational impact. • Ability to design non-production environments so they are cheaper than production while still useful for development and QA.