Skills & Experience

• 8+ years in DevOps, platform, release or infrastructure engineering, including 3+ years designing and owning CI/CD platforms end to end — not only operating pipelines someone else designed.
• Demonstrated experience inheriting an immature or poorly built pipeline estate and rebuilding it to a standard you defined. Be prepared to walk us through one in detail.
• Expert in Azure DevOps: YAML multi-stage pipelines, templates, environments and approvals, deployment groups, service connections with workload identity federation, branch policies, Azure Artifacts, agent pool management.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code practice (Bicep or Terraform) for Azure, including environment parity and drift control.
• Expert PowerShell and Azure CLI; comfortable automating Windows Server and IIS administration (app pools, bindings, warm-up, configuration) rather than clicking through it.
• Strong experience building and deploying .NET applications (MSBuild, dotnet CLI, C#) including legacy .NET Core 3.1 workloads that are out of Microsoft support, and modern .NET 8 / ASP.NET / React / Node.js / NPM front-end build pipelines.
• Azure SQL Database release engineering: DACPAC / SqlPackage deployments, schema-change safety, pre-deployment backup and rollback discipline.
• Azure monitoring and observability: Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics (KQL), alert design and action groups.
• Azure Key Vault, App Configuration, Managed Identities, Azure RBAC, Application Gateway, NSGs and core Azure networking and security concepts.
• Artifact management: immutable artifacts, semantic versioning, dependency management, retention and feed governance, release traceability.
• Working experience with incident management, post-incident review and runbook practice in a production environment.
• Clear written and spoken communication: you can explain a design decision or an incident to engineers and to non-technical leadership.

Nice to have

• Experience in SOC 2, ISO 27001 or otherwise regulated SaaS environments, including producing change-management evidence from the pipeline.
• Experience with data-residency requirements (e.g., workloads constrained to a specific region or country).
• Containerisation and managed hosting on Azure (App Service, Azure Container Apps or AKS) as part of a modernisation path from VM/IIS hosting.
• GitHub Actions in addition to Azure Pipelines.
• Database administration fundamentals (performance, indexing, backup/restore strategy) alongside release automation.
• Test-automation integration (unit, integration, smoke and synthetic tests as pipeline gates).
• Azure cost awareness: right-sizing environments, scheduling non-production compute, reserved capacity.
• Azure certifications such as AZ-400, AZ-104 or AZ-305.

Responsibilities

CI/CD Platform Design and Release Engineering

• Design, build and own deterministic Azure DevOps YAML multi-stage pipelines using reusable templates; migrate remaining Classic build and release definitions to YAML.
• Implement a build-once / deploy-many model: immutable, versioned artifacts promoted unchanged through DEV, Staging, UAT and Production, with environment-specific configuration injected at deploy time.
• Automate build, test, validation, deployment, rollback and environment promotion end to end, with no manual steps on the release path.
• Implement deployment strategies that eliminate downtime for IIS-hosted applications (blue/green, rolling or slot-style patterns using Application Gateway), with automated health checks and automated rollback on failed validation.
• Manage Azure Artifacts, NuGet and NPM feeds, deployment packages and release dependencies, including retention, upstream-source governance and vulnerability policy.
• Automate Azure SQL schema releases (DACPAC) with pre-deployment backups, reversible migration patterns and explicit rollback procedures for database changes.

Source Control and Engineering Governance

• Drive trunk-based development, branch policies, PR validation builds, required reviewers and quality gates (build, unit and integration tests, code coverage thresholds, static analysis).
• Ensure every production release is traceable from work item to commit to build to artifact to deployed environment, with that evidence available for audit without manual effort.
• Define and enforce pipeline, repository and environment standards that internal engineers and external delivery partners must follow; review partner-delivered pipeline and infrastructure changes before they reach production.
• Measure and improve deployment reliability, release velocity and developer productivity; remove friction from the developer workflow without weakening controls.

Reliability, Monitoring and Production Support

• Design and implement observability for the application and deployment platform using Azure Monitor, Application Insights and Log Analytics: dashboards, service-level indicators, alerting with clear ownership, and deployment-health telemetry.
• Define and run release and incident runbooks; lead post-incident reviews for release-related and platform incidents and drive the corrective actions to closure.
• Serve as the technical escalation point for production release and platform incidents, and help establish a sustainable production-support and on-call model for DevOps, server and database issues.
• Validate backup, restore and disaster-recovery procedures for the environments the pipeline deploys to; test rollback and recovery, not just forward deployment.
• Eliminate configuration drift between environments through Infrastructure as Code and automated compliance checks.

Security, Compliance and Change Control

• Build security into the pipeline: secret scanning, dependency and container/package vulnerability scanning, static analysis gates, signed and immutable artifacts.
• Implement secure configuration and secret management with Azure Key Vault, App Configuration and Managed Identities; eliminate stored credentials in code, pipelines and configuration files; use workload identity federation for service connections.
• Apply least-privilege access across Azure DevOps (projects, pipelines, environments, service connections, agent pools) and Azure (RBAC); maintain segregation of duties between those who write code and those who approve production releases.
• Design the release process so SOC 2 change-management evidence (approvals, test results, deployment records, audit trail) is produced automatically by the pipeline rather than assembled by hand.
• Respect data-residency constraints in pipeline and infrastructure design, including environments that must remain in a specific Azure region.

Azure Infrastructure and Environments

• Define and manage environments as code (Bicep or Terraform) so DEV, Staging, UAT and Production are provably consistent and reproducible.
• Administer Azure Virtual Machines, Windows Server and IIS, including OS and runtime patching strategy, image and configuration baselines, and capacity planning.
• Configure and maintain Azure Application Gateway, NSGs, routing rules and TLS certificate lifecycle (automated issuance and renewal, no expiry-driven outages).
• Build PowerShell and Azure CLI automation for deployment and infrastructure operations; retire manual processes as a matter of course.
• Contribute to the platform modernisation roadmap (containerisation, managed hosting, cloud-native monitoring and messaging) and keep the pipeline design ready for it.

Standards, Documentation and Enablement

• Document the platform: architecture, standards, runbooks, onboarding guides and decision records. If it is not written down, it is not done.
• Coach developers and delivery partners on the release process; make the right way the easy way.
• Report platform health and release metrics to engineering leadership in plain language.