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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Azure Engineer

💰 $100,000 - $160,000

CloudITEngineeringAzureDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

An Azure Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing, and operating scalable, secure, and cost-effective Azure cloud infrastructure and platform services. This role partners with application teams, security, networking, and SREs to deliver production-ready cloud environments using infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, and cloud governance best practices. The Azure Engineer leads cloud migrations, optimizes performance and cost, enforces security and compliance controls, and provides on-call and incident response for Azure-hosted systems.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Cloud Operations Engineer
  • Systems Administrator with Azure exposure
  • DevOps Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Azure Cloud Engineer
  • Cloud Architect / Azure Solutions Architect
  • Platform Engineering Lead

Lateral Moves:

  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Security Engineer (Cloud Security)
  • Kubernetes Platform Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design and implement enterprise-grade Azure architecture for IaaS, PaaS and containerized workloads, including virtual networks, subnets, peering, NSGs, Azure Firewall, and ExpressRoute/VPN connectivity to meet security and latency requirements.
  • Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, Bicep, or ARM templates to provision Azure resources reliably, support modular reusable modules, and enable automated deployments across environments.
  • Create, manage and optimize CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions) to automate build, test, and deployment workflows for infrastructure and application releases following GitOps principles.
  • Deploy, configure, and operate Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters, including node pool management, cluster autoscaling, pod networking (CNI), ingress controllers, and Helm-based application deployments.
  • Implement and manage identity and access management using Azure Active Directory, Managed Identities, RBAC, conditional access, and Privileged Identity Management to enforce least privilege.
  • Implement Azure governance controls using Azure Policy, Blueprints, Management Groups and tagging strategies to enforce standards, compliance and cost controls across subscriptions.
  • Configure and manage Azure Storage (Blob, Files, Premium SSDs), Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB, and managed services ensuring backup, high availability and proper access patterns for performance and cost-efficiency.
  • Design and execute cloud migration strategies (lift-and-shift, re-platform, refactor) for enterprise applications, perform discovery and dependency mapping, and lead migration waves using Azure Migrate and Data Migration tools.
  • Implement monitoring, alerting, and observability using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights and custom dashboards to ensure SLOs/SLAs and enable proactive incident detection and root cause analysis.
  • Define and implement disaster recovery and business continuity plans using Azure Site Recovery, backups, and cross-region replication to meet RTO/RPO objectives.
  • Harden Azure infrastructure by applying security best practices: network segmentation, NSGs, Azure Firewall, DDoS protection, Key Vault for secrets management, disk encryption, and continuous vulnerability scanning.
  • Optimize cloud costs through rightsizing, Reserved Instances/Savings Plans, spot instances, storage tiering, and cost governance with Azure Cost Management and tagging/cost-center reporting.
  • Automate operational tasks and runbooks with Azure Automation, PowerShell, Azure CLI, and Functions to reduce toil, enable self-service, and accelerate delivery.
  • Collaborate closely with application architects and developers to design platform services, shared components, and microservices patterns that maximize resilience, scalability and maintainability in Azure.
  • Lead and participate in incident response and post-mortem activities, coordinating cross-functional teams, documenting findings, and driving remediation and preventive actions.
  • Perform capacity planning, performance tuning and scalability testing for compute, storage, and database services to support growing workloads and peak usage patterns.
  • Implement network security and hybrid connectivity solutions including VNet peering, service endpoints, private endpoints, Azure Front Door, and traffic management to ensure secure and performant connectivity.
  • Maintain and enforce encryption, key lifecycle and secret rotation using Azure Key Vault, Managed HSM, and integration with DevOps pipelines for secret injection without exposing credentials.
  • Lead proof-of-concept (POC) evaluations of new Azure services and third-party tools, provide technical recommendations, and develop migration/implementation roadmaps.
  • Produce and maintain high-quality documentation, architecture diagrams, runbooks, SOPs, and onboarding guides to enable reproducibility and operational excellence.
  • Mentor junior cloud engineers and developers on Azure best practices, IaC patterns, cloud security fundamentals, and operational procedures to raise team capability.
  • Integrate and manage messaging and eventing services such as Service Bus, Event Hubs, and Event Grid as part of event-driven architectures and streaming solutions.
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory and corporate controls (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI where applicable) by supporting audits, implementing logging and retention policies, and validating control maturity.
  • Coordinate with procurement and vendor management to evaluate, license and manage third-party SaaS/PaaS solutions running on Azure.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep expertise with Microsoft Azure services including Compute (VMs, Scale Sets), AKS, App Services, Storage Accounts (Blob, Files), Azure SQL, Cosmos DB and Azure Functions.
  • Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience with Terraform, Bicep or ARM templates; practice with modular, testable IaC and state management.
  • CI/CD and pipeline automation experience using Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or comparable tools for both infrastructure and application delivery.
  • Proficient with scripting and automation: PowerShell, Azure CLI, Python, and familiarity with REST APIs for Azure service automation.
  • Solid networking knowledge: VNets, subnets, peering, gateway, ExpressRoute, private endpoints, NSGs, and load balancing (Azure Load Balancer, Application Gateway).
  • Cloud security and identity management: Azure AD, RBAC, Key Vault, Managed Identities, conditional access, and knowledge of Azure Defender / Sentinel.
  • Monitoring, logging and observability: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, and alerting configuration to support SRE practices.
  • Experience with containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes concepts, Helm charts, and AKS operational best practices.
  • Data platform familiarity: Data Factory, Synapse Analytics, Event Hubs, Service Bus and considerations for data migration and integration in Azure.
  • Disaster recovery, backup strategies and high availability design using Azure Site Recovery, geo-redundancy and backup vaults.
  • Cost management techniques and tools for cloud financial governance and optimization in Azure.
  • Experience with enterprise governance: Azure Policy, Management Groups, resource tagging strategies and compliance controls.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate technical concepts to stakeholders and write clear operational documentation.
  • Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting mindset; proactive in identifying root causes and long-term fixes.
  • Collaborative team player who partners effectively with developers, security, networking, and business stakeholders.
  • Demonstrated ability to prioritize competing demands and manage multiple projects in agile delivery environments.
  • Mentoring and knowledge-sharing aptitude to upskill peers and improve team standards.
  • Customer-focused mindset with a bias for action and continuous improvement.
  • Attention to detail for architecture reviews, security controls, and production readiness assessments.
  • Adaptability to learn new Azure services and apply them to evolving platform needs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a related technical field or relevant cloud certifications (e.g., Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator, Azure Solutions Architect, Azure DevOps Engineer).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Cloud Computing
  • Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8+ years in cloud engineering, systems administration, or DevOps with at least 2–4 years hands-on experience in Microsoft Azure.

Preferred: 5+ years of Azure-specific experience, demonstrable track record of designing and operating production cloud platforms, certifications such as Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, or equivalent.

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