Senior Azure DevOps Engineer

Role Overview :

As a Senior DevOps Engineer for the Kantar Insights team, you will be tasked with supporting a custom application development team who codes and deploys mostly to Microsoft Azure environments as well as minimal AWS environments

You will work as a member of the DevOps team who are responsible for all custom application deployments as well as the supporting cloud infrastructure.

The platforms supported today are built with Microsoft .Net and MSSQL backends.

There are also some large data warehouses and large data flow management in scope.

The DevOps team works closely with application developers, database admins, QA testers and project managers to support and provide guidance for all custom development deployed to a multi-tier application environment (Dev/Test/UAT/Prod).

Daily tasks will include, but are not always limited to, the following :

- Azure DevOps support for code repositories, YAML CI/CD pipelines using shared library/templating.

- Deploying infrastructure in both BICEP and manual click will be ongoing as we move toward a fully automated infrastructure-as-code model.

Completion expected by end of 2025.

- Working with tools such as Visual Studio, VS-Code or other clients to manage all versioning and repositories.

- Monitoring application health and availability with ongoing visibility using Azure dashboards, monitors and alerting tools.

- Converting or migrating legacy application resources to modern cloud or platform services will be ongoing while we move away from IaaS (VMs and Containers) to serverless PaaS.

Example: Supporting applications from virtual machine console apps to Azure App Services.

- Apply and maintain Kantars security, platform and budgeting standards to all areas of the process from application conception through production run.

- Trouble shoot all aspects of application or infrastructure CI/CD including build, deploy or runtime errors.

- Continuous optimization of processes using automation and scripting with YAML, PowerShell and BICEP.

- Conduct testing of new solutions and collaborate with leaders on results to make informed technical decisions.

- Staggered off-hour monitoring and escalation support will be needed for 24/7/365 application SLAs.

- Continuous cost and systems footprint reduction efforts expected while modernizing all platforms and applications.

Key Responsibilities

The Senior DevOps Engineer must balance several roles in the application development process, including application code packaging and deployments, management and automated deployments of cloud resources and application availability and performance monitoring.

They must also possess the communication and management skills needed to work within a custom application development team.

They will need to collaborate with product development, data services, QA testing and architecture teams throughout the development lifecycle.

Data handling, privacy and compliance, as well as overall application security standards are woven into all processes and will be a constant factor in all decision making.

Capabilities and experience

- Must possess a strong understanding of both Azure IaaS and PaaS solutions and their use cases.

- Hands-on experience in the packaging, building, automating, managing, and releasing of code from one environment to another.

- Supporting a muti-tier application environment.

- Expert level experience (2+ years) with Infa as Code (IaC) using Terraform or BICEP though Azure DevOps pipelines is a requirement.

BICEP is preferred.

- Must have strong scripting and automation experience with PowerShell, Terraform Ansible or similar technologies.

- Ability to configure and navigate code management tools such ad VS Code as well as maintaining versioning and protection.

- Strong understanding of cloud virtual networking, connectivity and traffic management including WAF, firewalls rules, routing, VPNs and private connectivity.

- Experience with disaster recovery and high availability within a client/partner facing environments.

- Ability to diagnose issues at all layers (full stack) including infrastructure, application or deployment errors, capacity or performance related and connectivity.

- Strong documentation and presentation skills.

- Must communicate with all directly supported teams with clarity to drive operational excellence throughout the development lifecycle.

- Plan, coordinate and execute environmental changes and set reasonable expectations while delegating tasks and managing projects through completion.

- Diagramming and documentation for all work will be requires.

- Availability for On-Call monitoring and incident escalation for areas of ownership.