Title: Lead Azure Infrastructure Engineer

Job type: Contract – 6 Months

Location: Bay Area, CA (Hybrid)

Key Skills: Cloud infrastructure/Platform engineering, Networking & Security, and Azure AI Services.

Nice to Have Skills: Azure certifications, SRE agent / AIOps, and integration with Fabric, Databricks, or Snowflake.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the Ops/SRE team. Set priorities, assign work, coach engineers, and run the daily onshore/offshore hand-off.
• Set up and manage the Azure infrastructure for AI services: networking, identity, security and compute.
• Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code and deployment pipelines for consistent Dev, QA and Prod environments.
• Own platform reliability: monitoring, alerting, capacity and quota planning, cost control, and disaster recovery.
• Own the operating model: incident and problem management, root cause analysis, SLAs, runbooks and SOPs.
• Act as the onsite technical contact for major incidents, security and architecture reviews, and IT and vendor coordination.

Required Skills:

• 12+ years in cloud infrastructure or platform engineering, with 5+ years on Azure.
• 2+ years leading an Ops, SRE, or platform team, ideally across onshore and offshore.
• Azure networking and security: VNets, private endpoints, DNS, firewalls and network security groups, Entra ID / managed identities, RBAC and Key Vault.
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or Bicep) and CI/CD (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions).
• Containers and compute: AKS, App Service or Container Apps, Functions.
• Experience hosting and operating Azure AI services: Azure OpenAI / AI Foundry, AI Search, model deployments, quotas and throttling.
• Observability: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, App Insights. Experience with an SRE agent or AIOps is a plus.

Nice to Have Skills:

• Azure certifications and experience connecting to SaaS or data platforms such as Fabric, Databricks, or Snowflake.