Azure Architect---Infrastructure

Azure Architect---Infrastructure

Loc: New York, New York (or other locations with some travel to NY); Hybrid: 80% in office, 20% remote

Duration: Long term contract(24+ months)

Expected Rate: $open /hr. on c2c or w2.

JOB DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Enterprise Operations Architect to join our team. This role is pivotal in ensuring the overall health and operational excellence of our platform. The ideal candidate will ensure the enterprise view our platform is always current, incorporating new applications and architectural changes. This is a critical customer platform that cannot afford downtime due to outages. The primary responsibility of this role is to ensure our support teams are using best practices from an operational perspective, maintain a healthy system state that is optimized from an efficiency and security perspective. They will guide teams in infrastructure planning, security best practices, capacity planning, operational best practices, change management, and contribute to architectural guidance when selecting the best-suited infrastructural components and products.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and maintain a complete view of the production environment, ensuring it is always current and accurate.
• Ensure new applications and architectural changes are integrated and reflected in the enterprise view.
• Guide teams in infrastructure planning, security best practices, capacity planning, and operations best practices.
• Oversee change management processes to ensure smooth transitions and minimal disruptions.
• Provide architectural guidance for selecting the best-suited infrastructural components and products.
• Collaborate with stakeholders and leadership to balance cost and optimize operations, aiming to lower incidents and improve stability and issue resolution times.
• Conduct research on emerging technologies and recommend solutions that enhance cost-effectiveness and infrastructure flexibility.
• Develop policies, procedures, and standards for installing, configuring, maintaining, and troubleshooting end-user workstation hardware, software, and peripheral devices.
• Assist with disaster recovery and business continuity planning and testing.
• Develop automated deployment solutions that leverage Ansible for hands-off deployments at scale.
• Architect and manage mission critical self-healing solutions that emphasize resilience vs failover.
• Manage teams through critical outage situations and provide real-time updates to client until the outage is resolved. Ensure thorough root cause analysis is documented and signed off client.
• Ensure team is tracking system health and performance, and in a constant state of reviewing the platform for efficiency and optimization. This role will report system performance and outage stats to client executive team on a regular basis.
• Coordinate with network engineers, systems administrators, and software engineers to align technology decisions and ensure effective integration of IT systems.

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or technology domain.
• OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or technology domain.
• OR equivalent experience.
• Extensive experience in large-scale enterprise infrastructure and operations, both on-premises and in Azure.
• Strong knowledge of infrastructure, application programming, and web and software applications.
• Experience with one or more observability platforms that provide visibility from the application layer through services and physical infrastructure, facilitating the rapid identification and resolution of issues in development, testing, and production environments.
• Knowledge of service maturity models and the ability to prioritize and drive improvements across the enterprise's broader service portfolio. This includes prioritizing maturity pillars in relation to the wider range of services within the organization.
• Proven experience in designing and managing various IT systems, including networks, data centers, and cloud systems.
• Familiarity with the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
• Excellent stakeholder and leadership engagement skills.
• Ability to balance cost and optimize operations for lowering incidents and improving stability and incident resolution times.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field AND 10 years of experience in enterprise architecture, with a focus on public safety information systems highly desired.
• Experience with disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
• Knowledge of security best practices and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with change management processes.
• Ability to conduct research on emerging technologies and recommend solutions.
• Proficiency in third-party open-source solutions and other relevant technologies.