Cloud Engineer - Azure

Job description

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation. At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD. We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived. ***We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD.*** The Cloud Engineer - Managed Services is responsible for the day-to-day operation, administration, monitoring, support, and continuous improvement of customer cloud environments across public Clouds such as Azure, AWS, GCP or OCI. This role is primarily focused on cloud operations, service delivery, governance execution, incident/request/change support, documentation, and customer communication, with secondary exposure to automation, DevOps, and reliability practices where they improve operational consistency and scale. The role is expected to independently own standard and moderately complex operational execution and troubleshooting while escalating novel, high-risk, architecture-heavy, or major platform engineering work to senior engineers and architects as appropriate. This is an on-site role, with core working hours aligned to Eastern Time (EST). ### Duties/Responsibilities · Monitor and support cloud infrastructure, platform services, and operational tooling across customer environments. · Respond to incidents, service requests, alerts, and escalations; perform triage, troubleshooting, service restoration, and follow-through to resolution. · Execute standard changes and recurring operational tasks including provisioning, deprovisioning, access changes, maintenance activities, backup validation, patching coordination, and platform hygiene. · Administer cloud resources across compute, storage, networking, identity, security, and governance services within one or more major cloud providers. · Follow established ITSM processes for incident management, request fulfillment, change execution, escalation, documentation, and customer-facing status communication in accordance with service expectations. · Participate in customer meetings, status calls, and service reviews in a professional and courteous manner. · Work with Team Leads, Senior Cloud Engineers, architects, and other service delivery groups to resolve issues and complete operational work. · Assist with monitoring, alerting, tagging, policy management, cost visibility, and compliance-related operational activities. · Use scripting, automation and AI tools to improve consistency and reduce repetitive effort. · Apply DevOps/SRE tooling and practices (CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, source control, observability) where they improve reliability, consistency, and scale of managed cloud operations. · Participate in an after-hours/on-call rotation and support weekend work for major incidents, maintenance windows, and customer-approved change activity, as needed. · Other job duties as assigned. ### Education and Experience · Minimum Required - 3+ years in customer-facing IT infrastructure, cloud operations, systems administration, or managed services support. · Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform, with strong operational capability in one of Azure, AWS, OCI, or GCP. · Experience supporting incidents, requests, changes, or recurring administration activities in production environments. · Familiarity with Windows and/or Linux server operations, identity and access concepts, networking fundamentals, and monitoring tools. · Preferred - Experience in a managed services, consulting, or multi-customer support environment, with working familiarity across additional cloud platforms considered a plus. · Working knowledge of PowerShell, Python, Bash, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, or other automation tooling used to support cloud operations. · Relevant cloud, operations, or platform certifications are a plus. ### Knowledge, Skills, Abilities · Strong troubleshooting, operational execution, and issue ownership skills in live production environments. · Ability to prioritize competing tickets and tasks, manage time effectively, and meet commitments across multiple customers or workstreams. · Clear, professional verbal and written communication skills for customer-facing interactions and internal collaboration. · Strong documentation discipline, attention to detail, and respect for change control and operational process. · Working knowledge of identity and access management, RBAC, least privilege, security groups/firewall concepts, DNS, and core networking fundamentals. · Familiarity with monitoring, alerting, logging, event response, and core ITSM disciplines used in managed cloud operations. · Familiarity across core Azure services (Compute, Networking, Entra ID, Storage, Azure Monitor, Azure Policy) with the ability to advise customers on Azure architecture and operational best practices. · Ability to work independently, escalate appropriately, and collaborate effectively across immediate, extended, and external teams. · Familiarity with source control, pipelines, infrastructure as code, observability, and related DevOps/SRE concepts as supporting skills, not as the primary focus of the role. · Ability to travel as required. · Must be a self-starter and able to work without constant supervision. · Consistently exhibits a positive attitude towards AHEAD and its customers. · Works well with immediate, extend and external teams, a true team player. · Consistently meets expectations in terms of customer-facing, writing, presentation and problem-solving skills. · Consistently exhibits a positive attitude towards AHEAD and its customers. · Willing to go the extra mile when asked to do so (i.e., time outside of normal working hours to support a customer initiative, production roll-out, could also be > 40 hours for short intervals). · Highly respected by peers and sales team. · Culture o Support initiatives beyond area of responsibility o Encourage cross team interaction o Achieve success through others and not just self-actions