Job Description
Position Overview
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Azure Cloud Architect to lead the design, build, deployment, and operation of secure, scalable, resilient, and cost-effective solutions on Microsoft Azure.
This is a senior, hands-on architecture role. The successful candidate must be capable of taking full ownership of the Azure environment—from understanding business and technical requirements through architecture, implementation, migration, operational readiness, and ongoing optimization.
Experience within the healthcare sector is strongly preferred, particularly in environments involving sensitive patient data, healthcare applications, interoperability standards, regulatory compliance, and high-availability systems.
Key Responsibilities :
1. Azure Architecture and Solution Design
- Design enterprise-grade Azure cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures aligned with business, security, regulatory, and operational requirements.
- Develop Azure landing zones, subscription structures, management groups, resource hierarchies, network topology, and governance frameworks.
- Define architecture standards covering compute, storage, networking, databases, integration, identity, security, monitoring, backup, and disaster recovery.
- Design highly available, fault-tolerant, scalable, and business-continuity-ready solutions.
- Prepare architecture diagrams, solution design documents, technical specifications, deployment patterns, and operational runbooks.
- Conduct architecture reviews and ensure solutions comply with Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework principles.
2. Build and Implementation
- Lead and participate directly in the implementation of Azure infrastructure and platform services.
- Build Azure environments using Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, Bicep, or ARM templates.
- Design and implement CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
- Implement Azure services, including:
- Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets
- Azure Kubernetes Service
- Azure App Service and Azure Functions
- Azure SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance
- Azure Storage and Data Lake
- Azure API Management
- Azure Service Bus and Event Grid
- Azure Data Factory and Synapse Analytics
- Azure Monitor, Log Analytics and Application Insights
- Azure Backup and Site Recovery
- Microsoft Entra ID and Managed Identities
- Azure Key Vault
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud
- Microsoft Sentinel
- Support cloud migration, application modernization, database migration, and hybrid-cloud integration initiatives.
- Ensure architecture decisions are translated into properly configured and production-ready solutions.
3. Cloud Operations and Reliability
- Establish operating models for monitoring, incident management, change management, capacity management, patching, backup, recovery, and service continuity.
- Define service-level objectives, operational metrics, alerting rules, dashboards, and escalation procedures.
- Improve platform reliability through automation, proactive monitoring, performance tuning, and root-cause analysis.
- Design and test disaster recovery and business continuity arrangements.
- Ensure production environments meet agreed availability, performance, security, and recovery objectives.
- Support critical incidents and provide senior-level technical leadership during service disruptions.
- Establish DevSecOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and automated operational practices.
4. Security, Governance and Compliance
- Design secure Azure environments based on Zero Trust and defence-in-depth principles.
- Implement identity and access management, role-based access control, privileged access, multifactor authentication, conditional access, and segregation of duties.
- Establish Azure Policy, resource tagging, security baselines, audit logging, encryption, network controls, and compliance monitoring.
- Design secure connectivity using VNets, private endpoints, firewalls, VPNs, ExpressRoute, Application Gateway, Web Application Firewall, and network security groups.
- Ensure encryption of sensitive data at rest and in transit.
- Work closely with cybersecurity, risk, audit, privacy, and compliance teams.
- Support compliance with applicable requirements such as HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST, HITRUST and relevant local healthcare regulations.
- Participate in security assessments, architecture risk reviews, vulnerability remediation, and audit evidence preparation.
5. Healthcare Architecture
- Design cloud solutions capable of securely processing clinical, patient, claims, laboratory, imaging, pharmacy, and other healthcare-related information.
- Understand healthcare interoperability and integration standards such as HL7, FHIR, DICOM and healthcare APIs.
- Design secure integrations between Azure and electronic health record, hospital information, laboratory, radiology, billing, insurance, and third-party healthcare systems.
- Apply appropriate controls for protected health information and personally identifiable information.
- Support data residency, consent, retention, masking, anonymization, audit-trail, and privacy requirements.
- Experience with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Azure Health Data Services or FHIR services would be a significant advantage.
6. Cost Management and Optimization
- Design cost-effective solutions without compromising security, resilience, or performance.
- Establish FinOps practices, budgets, cost-allocation models, utilization reporting, and optimization controls.
- Review Azure consumption and recommend reservations, savings plans, right-sizing, auto-scaling, storage optimization, and removal of unused resources.
- Provide transparent cost estimates and total-cost-of-ownership analysis for proposed solutions.
7. Technical Leadership and Stakeholder Management
- Serve as the senior technical authority for Azure architecture and cloud engineering.
- Translate business, clinical, security, and operational requirements into practical technical solutions.
- Work with business leaders, healthcare stakeholders, application teams, data teams, infrastructure teams, security teams, vendors, and Microsoft partners.
- Lead technical workshops, architecture reviews, design approvals, and implementation planning.
- Mentor cloud engineers, DevOps engineers, administrators, developers, and junior architects.
- Evaluate technology options and provide clear recommendations, risks, dependencies, and implementation roadmaps.
- Manage technical delivery across internal teams, service providers, and implementation partners.
Required Qualifications and Experience
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
- Minimum 12 years of overall IT experience.
- Minimum 7 years of hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure.
- At least 4 years of experience in a senior cloud architect, solution architect, platform architect, or equivalent role.
- Demonstrated experience designing, building, deploying, and operating enterprise Azure environments.
- Strong understanding of Azure networking, identity, compute, storage, databases, integration, security, monitoring, and governance.
- Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, Bicep, or ARM templates.
- Experience with Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines, and DevSecOps practices.
- Strong experience with cloud migration, modernization, hybrid integration, and production operations.
- Experience designing high-availability, disaster recovery, backup, and business continuity solutions.
- Strong understanding of enterprise security, data protection, compliance, and risk management.
- Excellent architecture documentation, stakeholder communication, presentation, and technical leadership skills.
- Ability to remain hands-on and troubleshoot complex infrastructure, application, security, integration, and performance issues.
Preferred Healthcare Experience
- Prior experience working with hospitals, healthcare providers, diagnostic organizations, pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, or healthcare technology companies.
- Understanding of healthcare workflows and the sensitivity of clinical and patient information.
- Experience with HL7, FHIR, DICOM, EHR/EMR, PACS, LIS, HIS, claims, or healthcare integration platforms.
- Experience implementing healthcare data privacy, residency, retention, consent, encryption, and audit requirements.
- Knowledge of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Azure Health Data Services.
Preferred Certifications
One or more of the following certifications would be preferred:
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate
- Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert
- Microsoft Certified: Cybersecurity Architect Expert
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Network Engineer Associate
- TOGAF Certification
- ITIL Certification
- Relevant healthcare security, privacy, or compliance certification
Key Competencies
- Enterprise cloud architecture
- Hands-on Azure engineering
- Platform ownership and operational excellence
- Healthcare security and data privacy
- Architecture governance
- Problem-solving and technical decision-making
- Business and technical stakeholder management
- Team leadership and mentoring
- Vendor and partner management
- Risk, compliance, and audit awareness
- Cost optimization and FinOps
- Clear documentation and communication
Success Measures
The successful candidate will be assessed on:
- Delivery of secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective Azure solutions.
- Ability to take solutions from initial design through build and production operation.
- Compliance with security, privacy, healthcare, and architecture standards.
- Platform availability, performance, resilience, and disaster-recovery readiness.
- Reduction in operational incidents, security risks, and unnecessary Azure expenditure.
- Quality of architecture documentation, automation, monitoring, and operational handover.
- Effectiveness in leading technical teams and engaging senior stakeholders.
Important Role Expectation
This is not an architecture-only or advisory position. The candidate must be able to own the complete technology lifecycle:
Assess → Design → Build → Secure → Migrate → Deploy → Operate → Monitor → Optimize
The candidate should combine strategic architecture capability with strong hands-on Azure implementation and production-operation experience.
Work Location: In person
