Azure Cloud Solutions Architect

What You'll Do...

With a focus on cloud migrations and delivering exceptional outcomes for our clients, you’ll be working closely alongside our incredibly talented Cloud Engineers, Agile Delivery Managers and Sales team, as we help accelerate our customers migration journey into the cloud.

Whatever their industry or profile, technology is fundamental to the way they create value and you’ll be helping accelerate their capabilities.

Drawing on your broad knowledge of DevOps & Cloud Technologies you will help our clients create and implement new strategic capabilities when it comes to their migration. We are a Microsoft Gold partner so you’ll work extensively within best-practice frameworks. Depending on the maturity of the clients’ Cloud and DevOps adoption you will be involved in some or all stages of cloud adoption and modernisation, and will be able to guide them through, acting as an expert advisor, especially in the early stages.

You’ll also have plenty of opportunities and support to share your thoughts internally and externally by participating in meetups, blogging, social media etc.

Here’s how your first month will look…

• Our People Team have provided you with everything you need to know during your induction.
• You are now using the laptop, kit, and setup of your choice.
• You’ll dive straight into your squad’s stand-ups.
• You’ll join many Zoom calls with both prospective and existing customers; shadowing the engineers, consultants and Agile Delivery Managers in your squad to understand our approach to presales, discovery, architecture, delivery, operations and governance.
• Your teammates will have bought you up to speed with their in-flight client work, and you’ll get under the skin of the technology and architectural choices they’ve made.
• We’ll introduce your squad’s strategy and you’ll start to see how you can contribute, beyond your client work, to moving us forward as a business.
• You’ll attend your first (virtual) DevOpsGroup Conference
• As a new starter, the access to our knowledge base and support systems is coming in real handy.
• Any queries or concerns? These have been addressed and you’re more than ready for your DevOpsGroup future

By month three…

• Your confidence has grown as you really start to form relationships with our clients at all levels of their business.
• You’ve continued pairing with others in your squad and you’re now working independently on areas you are more familiar with
• With full support from your squad, you’re now ready to assume your role as the technical design lead for a customer or two.
• You’ve had several opportunities to influence technology and architecture choices for some migration projects
• You’ve been involved in pre-sales, and you’re now much more confident in our prescriptive Cloud Migration Assessment.
• Perhaps you are sharing your skills and expertise to help other members of the team to grow, and you’ll have built great relationships with your team.
• You’re working closely with our Product Team and are helping to refine our Cloud Migration Framework.
• You will have experienced a full Business Case Assessment and will be working with your team to create a compelling and commercially viable plan for the next phase of the customer’s cloud journey.
• As you have full access to our DevOpsGroup Academy, you’ve probably completed some further Cloud, DevOps or Agile certifications!
• Perhaps you’ve got a thing or two wrong along the way, failure is an option at DevOpsGroup and is something we are always learning from.
• You may have planned how you’ll be spending your training budget.
• You are now familiar with every member of the DevOpsGroup family and how the different teams support you in your role.

A full year with DevOpsGroup…

• You’ve shaped several successful cloud migrations and overcome some personal milestones of your own on the way
• You’ve designed a handful of leading-edge cloud-native platforms that have accelerated our clients development
• On reflection, you’ve done some fantastic work with our partners and clients and you can see the impact you’ve had on their businesses.
• You know what you know, and know what you don’t know with thanks to your learning pathway.
• You know what is required of you to achieve the next grade in your career here
• There’s been some epic highs and one or two lows along the way.
• Your customer satisfaction metrics demonstrate the high quality of delivery you and the squad have achieved, and reflecting on a recent customer case study demonstrates the difference DevOpsGroup can quickly make to our customers.
• From Recruitment to Finance, you’ve collaborated with every team at DevOpsGroup.
• You are helping to develop DevOpsGroup as a company and play a role in shaping the company’s future

Meet some of our engineers

Bob Larkin

Lead Engineer

Daniel Rees

Engineer

Edmund Dipple

Engineer

Jake Morgan

Engineer

We're looking for someone who...

• Is an experienced Azure Architect (ideally with some Microsoft certifications already under your belt)
• Loves problem solving and is naturally inquisitive.
• Has excellent written and verbal communication skills across all technical levels.
• Enjoys running customer workshops to help understand their business and technical requirements.
• Relishes the challenge of architecting cloud solutions to meet a wide range of customer needs.
• Understands how to persuade and influence people at all levels within IT.
• Can provide technical guidance and mentoring to the team, and our customers.
• Learns rapidly and loves to develop their skills.
• Is excellent at sharing knowledge and explaining technical concepts.
• Is able to work with Scrum and Kanban Agile methodologies.

Key responsibilities...

• You will be instrumental in the delivery of successful cloud adoptions for DevOpsGroup’s Customers.
• You will be the technical authority for the solution design for cloud migrations and technical design decision making within your squad.
• You will develop and contribute to company-wide technical policies, strategies and best practices.
• You will be the escalation point for design decisions, technical blueprints, and technical design queries within your squad.
• You will be responsible for the evaluation of new cloud-technologies for customers, including the incorporation into their cloud adoption strategies.
• You will be responsible for communicating strategic technical decisions to senior stakeholders within our customers and partners.
• You will actively engage with our Partners and work closely with our partner team to ensure DevOpsGroup is getting the maximum value from Partner programmes and competencies
• You will work closely with our product team to enhance our Cloud Migration Framework.
• You will contribute to internal training materials and deliver internal knowledge sharing on cloud technologies and best practices.
• You will contribute to DevOpsGroup’s technical strategy through membership of internal technical communities of practice and your contributions to our inner-source projects.
• You will contribute to DevOpsGroup’s cloud thought leadership through blog posts, technical white papers, events, and conference talks as an advocate for cloud technologies.

Experience you'll need...

• Deep knowledge and understanding of Azure core infrastructure and platform services including container orchestrators.
• Experience working on architecting solutions for cloud-based deployments
• The ability to make well-reasoned recommendations for a client, using requirements and existing knowledge, and to defend those recommendations.
• Confident in running workshops with clients and presenting using a wide range of tooling, both virtually and in-person.
• The ability to write reports, presentations and business cases for clients, with good written, verbal and financial reasoning.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to different levels of a client’s company, from engineers to C-level in mid-sized businesses.
• Good knowledge of how traditional deployments work, including physical datacentres, virtualisation, networking and storage.
• Ability to work alongside delivery managers and engineers to manage multiple stakeholders and balance priorities and the team.
• A strong appreciation of Operability concepts with a ‘design for operations’ approach and mind-set
• An understanding of technologies that underpin a DevOps approach to cloud migration and management, including but not exclusive to, Infrastructure-as-Code, Configuration-as-Code, Containerisation and Orchestration, CI/CD, Test Automation.

Desirable Experience

• A background working for managed service providers or consultancy service providers.
• Experience with large scale migrations to the cloud.
• Experience of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
• A high-level understanding of other cloud providers such as AWS
• Experience with configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, or Ansible
• Experience with pipeline tooling such as Jenkins, CodePipeline, Azure DevOps, or CircleCI
• Experience with both relational and non-relational databases, such as MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, and CosmosDB
• Experience with programming languages, such as Python, Go, .NET, or Java