The Senior Azure Cloud Architect is responsible for designing, governing, and evolving the organization's Microsoft Azure cloud architecture strategy, with Azure positioned as the primary enterprise cloud platform. The role ensures Azure environments are secure, scalable, resilient, cost-effective, and aligned with business objectives, while maintaining awareness of AWS and Google Cloud Platform capabilities where required for interoperability or future-state planning.
The Cloud Architect works closely with enterprise architects, cybersecurity teams, application owners, DevOps engineers, infrastructure teams, and business stakeholders to drive cloud adoption, modernization initiatives, and digital transformation programs.
Responsibilities
Azure Strategy & Architecture
- Develop and maintain Azure architecture roadmaps aligned with business and technology strategies.
- Define target-state architectures, modernization approaches, and cloud migration strategies.
- Establish Azure architecture standards, reference patterns, and governance guardrails for secure enterprise-scale adoption.
- Apply the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and Azure Well-Architected Framework to guide cloud design, governance, and modernization initiatives.
- Promote Azure as the primary cloud platform while supporting interoperability with AWS and GCP where required.
Azure Platform Design & Landing Zones
- Lead the design, governance, and evolution of Azure Landing Zones.
- Define subscription strategies, management groups, resource organization, naming standards, tagging, and policy controls.
- Design secure Azure networking and hybrid connectivity architectures, including hub-and-spoke, private connectivity, DNS, and segmentation.
- Architect solutions across Azure IaaS, PaaS, containers, data, analytics, integration, AI, disaster recovery, and business continuity services.
- Establish security baselines using Azure Policy, RBAC, Microsoft Entra ID, Defender for Cloud, Key Vault, and monitoring capabilities.
- Ensure integration between Azure, on-premises, and other cloud environments where required.
Governance, Compliance & Security
- Define and maintain cloud governance frameworks aligned with security, risk, compliance, and operational requirements.
- Ensure compliance with relevant industry standards and regulations, including ISO 27001, ISO 22301, SOC 2, GDPR, and NIS2.
- Design secure-by-default cloud architectures using Zero Trust principles, identity and access management, encryption, monitoring, and threat protection services.
- Conduct architecture reviews, security assessments, and design assurance activities using Azure Well-Architected principles.
Cloud Migration & Modernization
- Lead cloud transformation and migration initiatives.
- Assess workloads and define migration strategies, including rehost, replatform, refactor, retire, and replace approaches.
- Drive application modernization, containerization, and cloud-native adoption.
FinOps, DevOps & Automation
- Develop cloud cost optimization and governance strategies, including KPIs and reporting.
- Promote Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD automation, and cloud-native architecture practices.
- Support the adoption of DevOps and Platform Engineering capabilities.
Stakeholder Engagement
- Provide cloud architecture leadership across global initiatives.
- Present technical solutions to technical and business stakeholders, including executive leadership.
- Mentor engineering and operations teams and serve as a trusted advisor on cloud strategy and architecture decisions.