Azure Platform Engineer

Summary

We are seeking a senior Azure Platform Engineer to lead design, deployment, and operation of production workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This role is critical for enabling scalable, secure microservices and accelerating time-to-market through repeatable AKS bootstrapping, CI/CD enablement, and platform automation.

The engineer will work hands-on across AKS cluster administration, deployment pipelines, security enforcement, observability, and automation templates. This is an opportunity to shape a Platform-as-a-Service offering, improve operational maturity, and drive GitOps-based delivery for event-driven microservices.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to meet security, resilience, and performance goals.
• Lead AKS bootstrapping, cluster/node/pod configuration, and operational support activities.
• Build automated deployment templates for customers to provision AKS instances.
• Implement and maintain CI/CD and GitHub build/release pipelines for Dev, Stage, and Production environments.
• Configure autoscaling (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, Cluster Autoscaler) and integrate Azure Container Instance (ACI) where appropriate.
• Implement Pod security policies, node-to-node encryption, and enforce NIST-aligned security controls when deploying container images.
• Integrate AKS logs (application, event, cluster, user activity, diagnostics) into Azure Event Hub or Storage and enable real-time monitoring.
• Manage authentication and authorization for cluster access using managed identities, service principals, certificates, and secrets.
• Deploy and manage HTTPS Ingress controllers and TLS certificate management for Kubernetes services.
• Use governance and scanning tools to monitor images, runtime, vulnerabilities, registries, and hosts.

Requirements

• 3-4 years of hands-on container deployment experience on Azure AKS.
• 7+ years working with microservices, with focus on event-based services, scalability, and security.
• 4+ years of Azure engineering experience designing, developing, and deploying Azure cloud solutions.
• Proven experience developing and implementing AKS-hosted solutions and Kubernetes build pipelines.
• 2+ years building automation/CD pipelines with Terraform and Flux following GitOps practices.
• Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes concepts: pods, nodes, ConfigMaps, selectors, services.
• Experience deploying and configuring HPA, Cluster Autoscaler, and integrating Azure Container Instance (ACI).
• Experience deploying Linux and/or Windows Kubernetes clusters from Azure CLI and using AKS for CI/CD runtime.
• Working knowledge of NIST security policies and standards, FedRAMP, CSA, or ISO cloud/container standards.
• Proficient with code versioning tools such as GitHub.
• Experience pulling images from private Azure Container Registry (ACR) and deploying to AKS.
• Familiarity with API standards (Swagger, REST) and database technologies mentioned (Azure SQL Server, MongoDb, PostgreSQL).

Nice to Have

• Hands-on knowledge of Istio, Envoy, Helm, Kustomize, Flux, Crossplane
• Experience with governance and security tools such as Arnica, Wiz, SonarQube
• Familiarity with observability tools like Prometheus and Dynatrace
• Experience with Kusto query language or integrating logs into Azure monitoring systems
• Background working in Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or GitOps-based development lifecycles
• Terraform scripting
• YAML
• Shell scripting for Azure CLI automation