Senior Azure Platform Engineer
Role: Senior Azure Platform Engineer Location: Remote Contract We’re seeking a Senior Platform Engineer (Azure) to design, build, and operate secure, scalable CI/CD and platform automation for City of Hope’s cloud workloads—spanning research, clinical, and enterprise domains. You will be a technical leader driving best practices across Azure and GitHub, enabling product and data teams to deliver safely and quickly.
Key Responsibilities
Platform Engineering & IaC Architect, implement, and maintain Azure landing zones and foundational services using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and GitOps patterns. Standardize environment provisioning, configuration, and policies with Azure Policy, Blueprints, Managed Identities, Key Vault and env zero. CI/CD & Developer Productivity Own and optimize the GitHub ecosystem: Pipelines/Actions, Repos, Packages/Artifacts, Environments, and protected branch strategies. Build reusable pipeline templates, task libraries, and golden paths for app, data, and ML teams (multi-stage YAML, environment approvals, gating, quality signals). Observability, SRE & Reliability Implement end-to-end telemetry with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics and Application Insights. Drive incident response, blameless postmortems, runbooks, and reliability engineering improvements (resiliency testing, autoscaling, chaos experiments). Security & Compliance Embed security-by-design: DevSecOps scanning (SAST/DAST/Secrets/Container) and policy-as-code (e.g., OPA). Ensure HIPAA-aligned controls across pipelines, secrets, networking (Private Link, VNET integration), data governance, and auditability. Cost & Performance Optimization Implement tagging strategies, budgets/alerts, rightsizing, and workload optimization for Azure services (compute, storage, networking, AI/ML). Collaboration & Leadership Review designs/PRs, advocate best practices, maintain documentation, and promote knowledge sharing. Partner with Infrastructure Services Manager to shape roadmaps, standards, and vendor/tool evaluations. Required Qualifications 7+ years in DevOps/SRE/Platform Engineering with at least 4+ years focused on Microsoft Azure. Expert with GitHub (Actions, Advanced Security, Packages, Environments). Strong IaC experience with Terraform (modular design, remote state, and policy integration). Proficiency with scripting/automation (PowerShell, Python, Bash) and YAML-based pipelines. Containerization & orchestration: Docker, AKS (or Kubernetes equivalents), image registries, and admission controls. Observability in Azure: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, App Insights, alerting & dashboards. Proven track record implementing DevSecOps (SAST/DAST/Secrets scanning, IaC scanning, dependency management, SBOM). Understanding of healthcare compliance and security (e.g., HIPAA, HITRUST, PHI handling) or other regulated environments. Excellent communication, documentation, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience supporting LLM/AI platforms (e.g., Azure ML, Azure OpenAI, model registries, feature stores, vector databases, Prompt/Guardrails). GitOps tools (e.g., Argo CD, Flux), policy-as-code (OPA/Conftest, Azure Policy). Networking in Azure: Hub/Spoke, Private Link, WAF, Application Gateway, Firewall, ExpressRoute/VPN, DNS, and certificate automation. Secret management at scale (Key Vault, managed identities, workload identities). Security frameworks and supply chain: GitHub Advanced Security, Dependabot, CodeQL, Defender for Cloud, Notary/COSIGN. Data platform familiarity (Databricks, Synapse, Purview) or eventing (Event Hubs, Service Bus, Kafka). Certifications: AZ‑400, AZ‑104/AZ‑305, CKA/CKAD, SC‑100/200, DP‑100 (nice to have).