Project Overview
The agency requires a Senior Azure Cloud Architect to own the design, governance, security posture, and migration of workloads across Azure compute, storage, networking, identity, data, and integration services.
This position specifically requires both deep hands-on Azure engineering and architecture-level design in a single individual. The Architect will produce reference architectures, diagrams, and architecture decision records that engineering teams can implement directly; define infrastructure as code standards for the team; lead architecture review boards and design authority meetings; and drive enterprise-scale landing zone design and governance aligned to the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and the Azure Well-Architected Framework.
The Architect shall be adept at interpersonal communications, teamwork, goal setting, and business process improvement, and shall be comfortable translating business requirements into technical designs and presenting solution designs and tradeoffs to CIOs, CTOs, and senior leadership.
Duties/Responsibilities
- Work effectively with federal and contractor personnel to execute the project tasks;
- Collaborate with NEA and other federal staff and contractors to refine and elaborate requirements;
- Design enterprise-scale Azure solutions across compute services including Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets, App Services, Azure Functions, Container Apps, AKS, and Azure Batch, selecting the right option for a given workload;
- Architect advanced Azure networking spanning Virtual Networks, NSGs, UDRs, Private Endpoints, Load Balancer, Application Gateway, Azure Firewall, Front Door, Virtual WAN, ExpressRoute, and VPN Gateway, including hub and spoke topologies and enterprise DNS strategy;
- Design identity architecture using Microsoft Entra ID, including Conditional Access, Privileged Identity Management, B2B and B2C scenarios, federation with on-premises Active Directory, managed identities, and RBAC;
- Apply the Azure Well-Architected Framework across reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence, and performance efficiency;
- Implement Cloud Adoption Framework practices, including enterprise scale landing zone design and governance blueprints;
- Design multi region, highly available, and disaster resilient solutions with defined recovery time and recovery point objectives;
- Produce reference architectures, diagrams, and architecture decision records that an engineering team can implement directly;
- Lead workload assessments using Azure Migrate and map applications to the five Rs of rehost, refactor, rearchitect, rebuild, and replace;
- Perform wave planning for large scale datacenter exits, including dependency mapping and cutover planning;
- Define infrastructure as code standards and repository structure for the team, and review and validate Bicep or Terraform code written by others;
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, including artifact management, secret scanning, and pipeline security hardening;
- Implement release strategies including blue and green, canary, and ring based deployments;
- Operate production AKS clusters, including upgrades, node pool management, and networking through Azure CNI or Calico, with Helm chart authoring and GitOps workflows using Flux or ArgoCD;
- Implement security, compliance, and governance using Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, and Key Vault with secret rotation, together with Azure Policy, Management Groups, and Blueprints, applying Zero Trust principles across identity, network, and data layers;
- Configure Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights, and author KQL queries for diagnostics, alerting, and dashboards;
- Provide incident command, including root cause analysis and capacity planning at scale;
- Drive FinOps practices using Azure Cost Management, reserved instances, savings plans, and rightsizing, and build total cost of ownership and return on investment models for executive stakeholders;
- Lead a team of engineers, including task assignment and design reviews with clear, constructive feedback;
- Lead architecture review boards and design authority meetings, and facilitate discovery workshops with business and technical stakeholders;
- Mentor engineers and architects on design patterns and troubleshooting technique.
