Azure Engineer L3

Job Description

Role Overview
Rackspace seeks a senior engineer for a leading retail client in the UK and Ireland. The customer is transitioning from a hybrid setup with legacy on-premises applications to a fully cloud-native, Terraform-provisioned infrastructure in Azure, integrating both third-party and internal systems.
This position demands both strong technical expertise and proficient customer relationship management to ensure successful service delivery. The ideal candidate will possess excellent communication skills and have experience working within a matrix organizational structure.
We are seeking a senior engineer with strong hands-on experience in Azure, DevOps, IaC, and at minimum previous Windows Administration in a large environment to join our Cloud Platform Support & Engineering Team. This role acts as a technical escalation point for the support operations team, collaborates with customers and internal leads, and thrives in a fast-paced matrix environment.

Key Responsibilities

- Technical Leadership: Lead technical discussions with customer engineering teams, delivering expert recommendations and best practices for Windows administration and Azure workload deployments, optimizations.
- Escalation and Resolution: Act as the primary escalation point for Windows (Compute, VM's) and Azure related technical issues, ensuring timely and effective resolution to minimize downtime and impact on customer operations.
- Collaboration: Work seamlessly within a matrixed environment and ability to work with more than one customer, partnering with Lead Engineers, Architects, Delivery Leads, and offshore support teams to ensure cohesive service delivery.
- Mentorship: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to L1 and L2 engineers, fostering skill development and operational excellence within the team.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable insights for non-technical stakeholders and leadership.
- Incident Reporting: Deliver timely incident reports and post-mortem analyses for infrastructure-related issues within managed Azure subscriptions, ensuring transparency and continuous improvement. Experienced in working with 24X7 Environment as escalation point.

Technical Expertise

- Azure Cloud Services (Must have)
- Understanding and working knowledge on commonly used Azure IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services (App Services, VWAN, Application Gateway, AKS, Front Door, LB, Firewall, ExpressRoute, Service Bus, Azure Cosmos DB, SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, LogicApp, Storage Accounts, Function App etc)
- IaC (Terraform) knowledge and hands on experience (Custom modules is a plus)
- Strong background on observability implementation, alert refinements and troubleshooting skills, ability to recommend improved observability
- Azure DevOps: infra pipelines using Terraform
- AKS configuration, provisioning, troubleshooting etc.
- Knowlege of Azure Cosmos DB, SQL DB for provisioning, troubleshooting.
- Strong expertise in observability tools (e.g., Azure Monitor, Grafana), alert refinement, and troubleshooting, with the ability to implement enhanced observability practices.
- Proficient in Azure DevOps, particularly infrastructure pipelines using Terraform for automation and scalability.
- Advanced experience with AKS: configuration, provisioning, scaling, and troubleshooting.
- Monitor and manage application secret expiry for in-scope secrets, ensuring security compliance.
- Coordinate vendor escalations and support requests to resolve critical issues efficiently.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Advanced proficiency in Terraform, including the development of custom modules for infrastructure automation.

- Windows Administration (Expected some level of experience in the past if not current)
- Manage, maintain and troubleshoot Windows Server environments across physical and virtual platforms
- Maintain Windows Failover Clusters and Always On Clusters for SQL Server or other enterprise applications.
- Configure, manage, and troubleshoot Microsoft IIS for hosting internal and external web applications.
- Perform system upgrades, patch management, and capacity planning.
- Monitor system performance and availability implement improvements and resolve issues proactively.
- Collaborate with development, security, and network teams to ensure optimal configuration and integration of systems.
- Provide L3/L4-level support for infrastructure incidents and changes.
- File System Capacity & CPU and Memory Performance Management.
- Network connectivity troubleshooting
- Proficient in diagnosing and resolving network connectivity issues in Windows environments
- Experience using Windows built-in tools such as ipconfig, ping, tracert, nslookup, and netstat for troubleshooting
- Ability to analyse and interpret Event Viewer logs for network-related errors
- Experienced in managing and troubleshooting DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP, and proxy settings on Windows systems.
- Familiarity with Windows Firewall and Defender configuration or network traffic control
- Knowledge of troubleshooting Ethernet, and VPN connections on Windows endpoints
- Ability to identify and mitigate common issues with Windows Network Location Awareness (NLA)
- Competent in using PowerShell for network diagnostics and automation
- Experience troubleshooting domain join issues and Active Directory network dependencies
- Patching using Cloud Native patching tools.
- Virtual Machine Backup and File System recovery.
- Local configuration of the Operating System (including the following roles: DHCP, DNS, Remote Desktop Services).

Qualifications:

- Experience: Total of 10+ years of experience with Windows and Azure someone who has worked in Windows extensively and moved along with Azure (5+ years of Windows experience is desired)
- Leadership: Proven experience in senior engineer role in operations/support and engineering engagements, with a track record of mentoring junior engineers.
- Technical Skills: Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, observability, automation, and security best practices.
- Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

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