TECHNICAL LEAD - Azure

Job Profile: Technical Lead - Azure Administration Experience required: 6-8 years Qualification: Any Graduate Work Location: Bengaluru Communication: Good Comms Required Joining timeline: 15-30days Job Description: Role Overview We are building a new Cloud Operations (CloudOps) department to establish strong operational ownership, governance discipline, and cost accountability across a complex Azure estate. This role joins the founding team and plays a critical part in defining industry-aligned standards where gaps currently exist. The Senior CloudOps Engineer acts as an operational authority responsible for reliability, security posture, financial governance, and day-to-day platform control across production and non-production environments. This is not a DevOps enablement or application delivery role. The mandate is to protect the platform, enforce guardrails, and translate business risk into technical controls. CloudOps Mission & Operating Model The Cloud Operations team defines and enforces clear operational swim lanes between CloudOps, Platform Engineering,and Application Development. The team establishes industry-standard operating models, eliminates ambiguity around ownership, and ensures teams operate within defined boundaries. This role actively helps mature the organization from ad-hoc cloud usage to a governed, auditable, and cost-controlled operating model. Core Responsibilities Own Azure operational reliability, uptime, and platform readiness Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident remediation Design and enforce Azure governance guardrails (Azure Policy, RBAC, PIM, naming, tagging) Own FinOps execution including rightsizing, reservations, savings plans, and spend accountability Operate AKS with focus on scaling discipline, node economics, and platform responsibility boundaries Maintain operational runbooks, SOPs, and formal change discipline Operational Mindset Clear understanding that Operations, DevOps, and Development are distinct disciplines. Comfortable challenging unsafe designs, enforcing standards, and saying no when risk, cost, or governance boundaries are violated. Mandatory Skills: Skill Set Required Must Have Good to Have 1 Azure Core Expertise (6+ years): Strong hands-on experience managing Azure subscriptions, networking, identity, and RBAC. Yes 2 Governance & Security: Implement and enforce Azure Policy, PIM, tagging, and compliance standards. Yes 3 Operational Excellence: Handle incidents, perform root cause analysis, and ensure high availability of platforms. Yes 4 Operations Mindset: Clear understanding of Operations vs DevOps vs Development responsibilities. Yes 5 FinOps: Optimize cloud spend through rightsizing, reservations, and savings plans. Yes 6 AKS Operations: Operate and scale Kubernetes clusters with focus on performance and cost. Yes 7 Certifications: AZ-305, AZ-104, AZ-900 (or equivalent knowledge). Yes 8 Automation & Scripting: Automate routine tasks using PowerShell, Azure CLI, or Python. Yes 9 Monitoring & Observability: Configure and use Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Datadog for proactive monitoring. Yes 10 Security Posture Management: Work with Defender for Cloud and common compliance frameworks. Yes 11 Governance Hygiene: Identify and fix access or configuration drift across environments. Yes 12 Change & Process Management: Maintain runbooks, SOPs, and follow structured change control. Yes 13 Cross-Team Collaboration: Work effectively with Platform Engineering and Application teams. Yes 14 Infrastructure as Code: General knowledge of ARM, Bicep, or Terraform Yes 15 DevOps: Good general understanding of libraries, pipelines, service connections, permissions. Yes 16 Certification: ITIL 4 is a plus. Yes