Cloud Architect (Azure)

Cloud Architect (Azure) — India

Location: India (Hybrid/Remote, overlap hours with US-based Architect(s) and Delivery Lead)

Experience: 10+ years overall, 6+ years in cloud/infrastructure architecture, including Azure

Role Summary

The Cloud Architect (Azure) owns cloud platform, infrastructure, environment, release, and CI/CD architecture on Microsoft Azure across the account's delivery pods, ensuring every workstream can build, test, and ship reliably regardless of which technology stack is ultimately selected. This role designs the cloud foundations, automation, and quality gates that both human engineers and AI coding agents build against, and is accountable for the architecture and operational practices that keep an agent-orchestrated development model secure, cost-efficient, and predictable in production.

Key Responsibilities

• Own Azure cloud architecture, including landing zones, subscription and management group structure, networking (hub-and-spoke, virtual networks, private endpoints), identity (Microsoft Entra ID), and governance through Azure Policy, repeatable per delivery pod.

• Own environment strategy: provisioning, configuration management, and refresh cadence for development, test, and staging environments on Azure across workstreams.

• Own CI/CD pipeline architecture (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions), branching strategy, and release automation, with automated quality gates (build, test, static analysis, security scanning) that apply consistently to both human-written and AI-agent-generated code before it merges or deploys.

• Own Azure infrastructure architecture, including compute (e.g., AKS, App Service, Functions), data and storage services, resilience and disaster recovery design, monitoring, logging, and alerting (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights), and reliability/SRE practices.

• Partner with the Principal Architect(s) to ensure cloud and infrastructure decisions align with the overall solution architecture, once the technology stack is confirmed.

• Own release management practices — versioning, rollback procedures, deployment windows — sized to support the delivery cadence of an agent-orchestrated build workflow.

• Direct and prompt AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code or equivalent) for infrastructure-as-code (Bicep, Terraform), pipeline configuration, and automation scripting, then review and harden the output.

• Own incident response and root-cause analysis processes for production issues, driving remediation and preventive fixes.

• Own security and compliance practices for Azure infrastructure — secrets management (Azure Key Vault), managed identities, role-based access control, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and audit logging — in coordination with the client's security team.

• Evaluate and integrate new Azure services, CI/CD tooling, and AI/agentic tooling into the delivery model.

• Set and enforce cloud and DevOps standards, including cost governance (FinOps), and mentor cloud and DevOps engineers embedded within each workstream's delivery pod.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years in enterprise technology roles with 6+ years specifically in cloud or infrastructure architecture, including hands-on design of production workloads on Microsoft Azure.

• Deep expertise in Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Bicep, ARM templates, Terraform) and CI/CD tooling (e.g., Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar).

• Strong background in Azure platform architecture — compute, networking, storage, identity (Microsoft Entra ID), and governance — grounded in the Azure Well-Architected Framework and Cloud Adoption Framework, plus monitoring/observability tooling (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights).

• Experience designing environment and branching strategies for multi-workstream delivery programs.

• Technology-agnostic release management experience — comfortable integrating CI/CD with either platform-specific deployment tooling (e.g., Salesforce release tools such as Copado/Gearset) or standard web-application deployment pipelines, depending on final stack selection.

• Hands-on experience directing or prompting AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code or an equivalent agentic development tool) — required, as this engagement uses an agent-orchestrated development model.

• Security-conscious approach to cloud design: secrets management (Azure Key Vault), access control, Azure Policy, and compliance awareness.

Preferred Qualifications

• Relevant certifications (e.g., Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, Terraform Associate).

• Experience in pharmaceutical distribution, healthcare, or another regulated industry.

• Experience setting up quality gates or guardrails specifically for AI-agent-generated code.

• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) background and experience with Azure cost management/FinOps practices.