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