Azure Operations Engineer

Job Title: Azure Operations Engineer
Location: Charlotte, NC (Hybrid)

Job Description:

We''re looking for a hands-on Azure Operations Engineer to support the day-to-day operational health of our Azure cloud estate. This is an execution-focused contract role: you''ll keep a close eye on alerts and cloud spend, run Terraform to provision and maintain infrastructure, write shell scripts to cut down on manual work, and build the disaster recovery runbooks the team relies on when something breaks.

Job Responsibilities:

Monitoring & Operations
Keep production healthy by watching the signals and acting on them. You''ll be the first set of eyes on alerts and the person flagging when costs drift.
Monitor alerts across critical services using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics (KQL), Application Insights, Grafana, and Prometheus, and respond or escalate as appropriate.
Track cloud costs, surface anomalies, and flag optimization opportunities to the team.
Monitor and operate middleware services (PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka); assist with root cause analysis on production issues.
Infrastructure as Code & Automation
Turn manual, repetitive operations into reliable, repeatable automation.
Execute and maintain Terraform to provision and update Azure infrastructure.
Write and maintain shell scripts that automate routine operational tasks.
Use Helm and ArgoCD to support application deployment and configuration.
Disaster Recovery
Make sure the team can recover quickly and confidently when incidents happen.
Build, document, and maintain disaster recovery runbooks for critical services.
Validate recovery procedures regularly and keep runbooks accurate and current.
Security & Governance
Operate within established guardrails and help keep the estate clean and compliant.
Apply least-privilege RBAC and work within existing Azure Policy and compliance guardrails.
Handle day-to-day secrets operations using Key Vault and managed identities.
Follow tagging and governance standards across subscriptions.

Required Qualifications:

Solid hands-on experience operating production cloud infrastructure on Azure.
Working knowledge of Azure core services: networking, compute, storage, and resource governance.
Expert with Azure identity (Entra ID).
Solid Linux and networking fundamentals.
Practical Terraform experience provisioning and maintaining infrastructure.
Strong scripting in Bash and Python.
Experience with monitoring tooling: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics / KQL.
Application Insights, Cost Management, Grafana, and Prometheus.
Experience operating common middleware (PostgreSQL, Redis, or Kafka).
Familiarity with RBAC, Key Vault, and operating within governance guardrails.

Preferred Qualifications:

Azure certifications such as AZ-104 or AZ-400.
Experience writing or maintaining disaster recovery runbooks.
Experience with multi-subscription environments.
FinOps / cost optimization exposure.

Monitoring & Operations
Keep production healthy by watching the signals and acting on them. You''ll be the first set of eyes on alerts and the person flagging when costs drift.
Monitor alerts across critical services using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics (KQL), Application Insights, Grafana, and Prometheus, and respond or escalate as appropriate.
Track cloud costs, surface anomalies, and flag optimization opportunities to the team.
Monitor and operate middleware services (PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka); assist with root cause analysis on production issues.
Infrastructure as Code & Automation
Turn manual, repetitive operations into reliable, repeatable automation.
Execute and maintain Terraform to provision and update Azure infrastructure.
Write and maintain shell scripts that automate routine operational tasks.
Use Helm and ArgoCD to support application deployment and configuration.
Disaster Recovery
Make sure the team can recover quickly and confidently when incidents happen.
Build, document, and maintain disaster recovery runbooks for critical services.
Validate recovery procedures regularly and keep runbooks accurate and current.
Security & Governance
Operate within established guardrails and help keep the estate clean and compliant.
Apply least-privilege RBAC and work within existing Azure Policy and compliance guardrails.
Handle day-to-day secrets operations using Key Vault and managed identities.
Follow tagging and governance standards across subscriptions.

Required Qualifications:

Solid hands-on experience operating production cloud infrastructure on Azure.
Working knowledge of Azure core services: networking, compute, storage, and resource governance.
Expert with Azure identity (Entra ID).
Solid Linux and networking fundamentals.
Practical Terraform experience provisioning and maintaining infrastructure.
Strong scripting in Bash and Python.
Experience with monitoring tooling: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics / KQL.
Application Insights, Cost Management, Grafana, and Prometheus.
Experience operating common middleware (PostgreSQL, Redis, or Kafka).
Familiarity with RBAC, Key Vault, and operating within governance guardrails.

Preferred Qualifications:

Azure certifications such as AZ-104 or AZ-400.
Experience writing or maintaining disaster recovery runbooks.
Experience with multi-subscription environments.
FinOps / cost optimization exposure.