Senior Cloud & IT Operations Engineer

The Goddard School is a well-established institution that supports over 650 schools with a high-quality, play-based learning program. They are seeking a Senior Cloud & IT Operations Engineer to manage and improve their Azure and Microsoft 365 platforms, ensuring operational integrity and reliability while leading incident responses and architectural decisions.

Responsibilities:

• Design, evolve, and validate Azure reference architectures aligned with Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework
• Contribute to architectural decisions for landing zones, subscription models, networking, and governance, with an emphasis on operational sustainability
• Architect, operate, and improve Azure PaaS workloads including:
• Azure WebApps and Functions
• Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Storage Accounts, Key Vaults, and networking components
• Ensure platform designs account for failure modes, operational complexity, security controls, and long-term maintainability
• Serve as a senior technical owner for the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, including:
• Entra ID (identity lifecycle, Conditional Access, MFA)
• Intune (endpoint management, compliance, application delivery)
• Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint
• Microsoft Defender
• Design and enforce secure, scalable identity and access models across Azure and SaaS platforms
• Partner with Service Desk and Service Delivery to ensure systems are supportable, well-documented, and operationally understood
• Design and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability for Azure and M365 services
• Lead and participate in incident response, including:
• Troubleshooting complex, multi-system failures
• Performing root cause analysis
• Driving durable corrective actions, not short-term fixes
• Continuously evaluate and improve availability, performance, capacity, security posture, and cost efficiency
• Automation infrastructure and operational workflows using PowerShell, ARM/Bicep, and/or Terraform
• Produce clear, durable technical documentation, runbooks, and operational standards
• Provide technical guidance and peer review that raises the effectiveness of the broader IT Operations function
• Act as a trusted technical sounding board for complex operational and platform decisions

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience
• At least 7 years of experience operating production Azure environments supporting business-critical workloads
• Demonstrated depth across the Microsoft 365 platform, including Entra ID, Intune, Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, and Defender
• Proven experience designing and operating Azure PaaS services in live production environments (IaaS-only backgrounds are not a fit)
• Strong command of Azure networking (VNets, routing, NSGs, private endpoints)
• Identity and access management (least privilege, Conditional Access, Zero Trust)
• Monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices
• Ability to diagnose and resolve ambiguous, cross-platform production issues under pressure
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, especially in operational and post-incident contexts
• Azure Administrator (AZ-104) and/or Solutions Architect (AZ-305) certification, or interest in achieving them
• Practical ITSM/ITIL experience in production environments
• Experience operating within small senior-heavy engineering teams where influence is earned, not assigned