Azure Solution Architect

Duration: 6+ months
Compensation: $70-80/hr
Location: 100% REMOTE
Job Description:
We are seeking a highly experienced Hands-on System Architect specializing in Azure API Management, enterprise integration, security, and messaging durability to design, implement, and secure the gateway layer of a mission-critical enterprise integration platform. The ideal candidate will combine strong architecture and governance capabilities with hands-on development experience in Azure API Management policies, OAuth 2.0/OIDC, Okta, Azure Service Bus, Python, and API-based integration patterns. This role will serve as the design authority for gateway security, delivery semantics, and resilience, ensuring that business state changes are reliably processed across Azure regions without data loss.The candidate must be comfortable working with Claude Code or a comparable AI coding agent, following spec-driven development and test-driven development (TDD) practices from the first week.
Key Responsibilities:

• Azure API Management: Design, develop, and maintain APIM policies, backends, ingress and delivery workflows, policy fragments, and deployment pipelines.
• API Security & Identity: Implement Okta JWT validation, OAuth 2.0/OIDC service-to-service authentication, client registrations, scopes, audience validation, key rotation, and managed identity authentication.
• Enterprise Integration: Design reliable integration patterns using Azure Service Bus Premium, synchronous geo-replication, OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, JSON Schema, and MCP tools.
• Messaging Reliability: Define and validate acknowledgement rules, retry and timeout behavior, idempotency, delivery guarantees, and disaster recovery requirements to prevent state-change loss or unintended duplicate processing.
• Architecture Governance: Prepare architecture review board (ARB) documentation, ArchiMate views, architecture decision records, data classification, and cost models.
• Security Assurance: Develop STRIDE threat models, coordinate external penetration testing, manage SAST and dependency scanning, support fuzz testing, and drive security findings to closure.
• Formal Verification: Develop a delivery-protocol model using TLA+ or an equivalent approach to validate message durability, exactly-once application semantics, crash recovery, and regional failover.
• Hands-on Development: Write production-quality APIM policy XML and Python code, including archiving and integration components.
• Capacity & Operations: Manage APIM capacity planning, reserved units, alerts, backend configuration, and deployment readiness on a shared enterprise instance.
• Production Readiness: Support disaster recovery drills, security approvals, production go-live, hypercare, operational handover, and warranty-period defect resolution.
• Technical Leadership: Act as the design authority for changes affecting delivery semantics, identity, and trust boundaries; review delivery-critical code and guide implementation teams.
• Knowledge Transfer: Transition gateway operations, runbooks, policy documentation, architecture decisions, and onboarding governance to the designated operational team.

Required Qualifications:

• 12+ years of professional IT experience, including at least 4 years as a Solution Architect or System Architect with hands-on coding responsibilities.
• Deep expertise in Azure API Management policy authoring, configuration, troubleshooting, and operations.
• Strong experience with APIM policies, including validate-jwt, validate-content, send-request, backend configuration, retries, and timeouts.
• Experience with APIM MCP server support and exposing REST APIs as MCP tools.
• Strong knowledge of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), Okta, service-to-service authentication, and managed identities.
• Hands-on experience with Azure Service Bus Premium, message durability, geo-replication, acknowledgement semantics, and disaster recovery.
• Experience designing resilient distributed systems with clear delivery guarantees, idempotency, and failover behavior.
• Proficiency in Python and APIM policy XML development.
• Experience with enterprise architecture governance, architecture review boards, security reviews, and disaster recovery sign-off.
• Practical knowledge of STRIDE threat modeling and security testing practices.
• Ability to use TLA+ or an equivalent formal or model-based verification technique.
• Experience with Claude Code or a comparable AI coding agent for software development and architecture documentation.
• Strong communication, technical leadership, documentation, and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with TLA+ or PlusCal.
• Azure Service Bus geo-replication and multi-region architecture experience.
• APIM capacity planning and performance management on shared enterprise instances.
• Experience with SOX controls, audit evidence, or other regulated financial services requirements.
• Experience managing external penetration tests and remediation activities.
• Insurance, reinsurance, treaty, or financial services domain experience.
• TOGAF, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or equivalent architecture certifications.

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