Associate Director- Azure SRE

As the Azure SRE Team Lead, you will be responsible for leading and mentoring a team of Site Reliability Engineers, driving operational excellence, and ensuring the reliability and scalability of our Azure-based infrastructure. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to design, implement, and maintain highly available systems, while advocating for best practices in automation, monitoring, and incident management. The ideal candidate will have strong leadership skills, deep technical expertise in Azure cloud services, and a passion for improving system reliability and performance.

• Leadership & Mentorship:
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Site Reliability Engineers, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Drive operational excellence by setting clear goals, priorities, and performance metrics for the team.
• Encourage professional development and knowledge sharing within the team.
• Reliability & Scalability:
• Own the availability, performance, and scalability of critical services in Azure.
• Define and implement Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) best practices, including SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Proactively identify potential risks and performance bottlenecks, and implement strategies to mitigate them.
• Automation & Infrastructure Management:
• Oversee the automation of operational tasks, including provisioning, deployment, monitoring, and incident response.
• Lead efforts to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or Azure DevOps Pipelines.
• Incident Management & Resolution:
• Manage and lead incident response for Azure-based infrastructure, ensuring quick resolution and root cause analysis.
• Define and continuously improve incident management processes, ensuring minimal downtime and impact on users.
• Collaboration & Stakeholder Communication:
• Work closely with engineering, DevOps, and security teams to design and deploy solutions that meet both reliability and security requirements.
• Communicate effectively with stakeholders across the organization, providing visibility into SRE efforts and service health metrics.
• Monitoring & Observability:
• Ensure robust monitoring, logging, and alerting are in place to proactively identify issues before they impact customers.
• Lead the adoption and continuous improvement of observability frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Azure Monitor).
• Continuous Improvement:
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives, including post-incident reviews, blameless retrospectives, and process optimizations.

Stay up-to-date with the latest Azure technologies and industry best practices, integrating new solutions to improve reliability.

• Education:
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Experience:
• 10+ year in IT/Infrastructure operations with 5+ years of experience in a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or DevOps role with significant exposure to Azure cloud environments.
• 5+ years of experience in a leadership or management role, ideally leading an SRE or infrastructure team.
• Proven experience in building and maintaining high-availability, distributed systems on Azure.
• Hands-on experience with Azure services such as Application Gateways, Azure Networking, NSG, Kubernetes (AKS), App Services, and Azure Functions.
• Technical Skills:
• Deep knowledge of Azure architecture, services, and infrastructure.
• Expertise in automation tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Azure DevOps, ARM templates, or similar.
• Proficient in scripting languages (e.g., Python, Bash, PowerShell) for automation and orchestration.
• Strong experience with containerization and orchestration tools, particularly Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Familiarity with monitoring tools such as Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK stack.
• In-depth knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies.
• Soft Skills:
• Strong leadership and mentoring skills with the ability to inspire and guide a team.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across multiple teams and articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Problem-solving mindset with a focus on improving operational efficiency, reliability, and scalability.
• Certifications (Preferred):
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert or Azure Administrator Associate.