Azure Technical Architect

Azure Technical Architect
A fantastic opportunity has arisen for an experienced Technical Architect to join our client’s dynamic and rapidly expanding Consultancy Practice. Their mission in is to be recognised by their customers, partners and peers as the market leader for IT Consultancy Services in terms of capability, delivery outcomes and the professional development of their people.
Year-on-year they significantly invest in the development of their people and Azure services, covering both technical and professional training, vendor accreditation and the creation of new and innovative Azure Cloud Services and Solutions for their customers.
The Technical Architect will deliver both pre and post sales technical consultancy to their customers, leading teams of consultants in delivery engagements as well as providing pre-sales qualification, bid response and design to consultancy engagements.
You’ll be part of a Practice, within the UK Professional Services function, supporting the business in either project or consultancy lead engagements specific to the Azure Cloud Platform
As a predominately client facing role you will have proven skills in working with customers to design and implement modern, scalable Azure based solutions & services, an understanding of Cloud Adoption Framework, Azure Devops and Enterprise Scale Landing Zone

The role
You’ll be an integral part of an opportunity team, supporting the business in either project or consultancy lead engagements.
You will work with customer stakeholders, IT Managers, Directors, and IT professionals during the pre-sales cycle, in addition to consulting with clients during their decision-making process to articulate technical strategy and business impact for the company and customer.
You’ll have clear areas of responsibility and will be given appropriate autonomy to lead customer pre-sales opportunities.
You will be responsible for influencing and shaping Microsoft Azure solutions during pre-sales engagements. To take advantage of this opportunity you will need to be a highly technical individual with solid hands-on capability as a Technical Designer, Solution Lead or Architect with the ability to transform and enhance client vision and outcomes into a winning solution.
Provide opportunity-specific Technical Assurance, Quality Assurance, Governance & Customer Satisfaction of pre and post sales consultancy engagements.
Lead customer meetings to understand and articulate/ steer the customer cloud transformation agenda, influencing and building relationships up to CxO level, defining technical strategy and business impact for the company and customer on their cloud journey.
You’ll work with the Azure Practice Lead, Pre-Sales Infrastructure Architect and Solution Lead in the creation of customer whitepapers and case-studies.
You’ll be an integral part of an opportunity team to provided responses to RFI/RFP's.
You’ll work with the Azure Practice Lead, Pre-Sales Infrastructure Architect and Solution Lead in managing and building important relationships directly with Microsoft UK.
Serve as an Azure evangelist, consult and provide technical guidance on Azure design, governance, performance, scalability, security, operations and cost control best practices
Assess the customer cloud maturity, review existing Azure cloud implementations, identify gaps and suggest improvements
Design Azure architecture to enable cloud migration programs, analyse existing application and IT services portfolios, develop assets’ migration, transformation and automation approach, craft implementation roadmaps.
Day-to-day lead the customer through the technical and organisational challenges of Cloud and DevOps transformation.

Ideal candidate:
Consultancy roles are aligned to the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). Azure Technical Architect to operate at SFIA level 5/6 (Initiate & Influence).
Azure certified to preferably Azure Solution Architect Expert level, and a Certified DevOps Engineer Expert, with a focus on Infrastructure,
SME in Azure DevOps and associated tools such as HashiCorp Terraform, ARM, Ansible, Python and BASH.
Experience in migrating applications into Azure and the design and considerations required (cluster sizing, auto scaling etc).
Understanding of Azure best practices around networking, security, state management and storage
Worked with one or more customers in the delivery of Azure services and have either led, mentored or managed other engineers / consultants in project delivery.
Good understanding of deploying AKS though DevOps tooling such as Terraform.
Experience in delivering Azure services in an agile approach using sprints, backlog items, stand ups etc. and have experience with tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps etc.
Significant experience in positioning the business benefits of Microsoft Cloud Solutions into SMC and Enterprise, Commercial understanding of partner usage incentives.
Working closely with Microsoft Account Team to identity and utilise e-CIF, AMP and other funded initiatives applicable to driving our customers cloud journey.
Work closely with our Azure Solution Lead and Sales Specialist(s) to help drive cloud migrations, envisioning, and optimisation services to capture margin, as well as provide savings to customers through pre-sales engagements.
AWS or Google GCP Cloud Certifications is a bonus.

Skills:
Must be highly proficient in Technical Governance.
Must be proficient with Azure IaaS, SaaS and PaaS Services, including: Azure Cloud Adoption Framework, Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, Cost Optimisation
Azure Managing Network and Applications:◦Azure Logic Apps
Azure Service Bus
Azure API Management
Azure Key Vault concepts
Azure Resource Management (ARM) templates: Azure Service Fabric or Kubernetes, Azure Storage Solution, Azure Load Balancer, Azure Sentinel, Azure Firewall, Azure AD, Azure Monitor, Azure Backup, Azure Security Centre, Azure Policy, Azure Automation
Must be familiar with Azure DevOps, execute Agile methodology within the tool ·
Must be proficient with Source Code Version Control tools such as TFVC and Git ·
Must be highly proficient with data standards like JSON and XML.
Must be highly proficient in Terraform, Ansible etc
Must be proficient in PowerShell and ARM templates
Must be familiar with DevOps change management and philosophy
Must be highly proficient with API design and development
Must understand Microservices architectural style and design principles · Domain-driven design
Experience in Cloud Cost Management and Optimization tools such as VMWare Cloud Health / Cloud Checker.
Automation by Infrastructure as a Code - Terraform, ARM, Powershell and/or Python
Experience in Azure Site Recovery, Azure Migrate and/or Microsoft MAP Toolkit.
Understanding of concepts such as virtualization, containerization, auto-scaling, experience with GIT, CI/CD integration toolchains, building fault-tolerant solutions and fully automated systems
Experience with hardening of modern operating systems, web and application servers, databases and proxies.