Sr. Azure SME
Phoenix, Arizona, United States of America
Contract
4 days ago
$60 - $65 USD
Key skills
PythonGoSQL.NETPowerShellAnalyticsAzureAzure DevOpsServiceNowJiraLeadershipTeam LeadershipCommunication
About this role
About the Role
We're hiring an Operations Manager to lead a production support team embedded within a large public sector technology engagement. The team directly supports a mission-critical line-of-business platform handling title, registration, and driver-credentialing workloads for a state-level motor vehicle organization. The entire application stack runs on Microsoft Azure and is built on .NET.
This is a hands-on production and operations leadership role. The primary measure of success is uptime and service health. You'll run the day-to-day rhythm of incident response, release coordination, and operational execution for a team that keeps this environment available, performant, and auditable.
What You'll Own
What You Bring
Nice to Have
Why This Role
You'll be the operational anchor for a platform that touches nearly every resident of the state it serves. The work is visible, the stakes are real, and the environment is stable and long-running - this isn't a short-term project role. You'll have a defined team, a clear mandate, and an established client relationship to build on.
We're hiring an Operations Manager to lead a production support team embedded within a large public sector technology engagement. The team directly supports a mission-critical line-of-business platform handling title, registration, and driver-credentialing workloads for a state-level motor vehicle organization. The entire application stack runs on Microsoft Azure and is built on .NET.
This is a hands-on production and operations leadership role. The primary measure of success is uptime and service health. You'll run the day-to-day rhythm of incident response, release coordination, and operational execution for a team that keeps this environment available, performant, and auditable.
What You'll Own
- Incident management: drive triage, bridge calls, escalations, and post-incident reviews for production issues on the Azure-hosted .NET platform.
- Release management: coordinate change windows, deployment gates, and go/no-go decisions through the Azure DevOps pipeline and ITIL change process.
- Operational cadence: lead the daily stand-ups, stakeholder syncs, ticket reviews, and reporting rhythm with the client and internal delivery leads.
- Troubleshooting: work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineers on live issues - you're expected to read logs, query telemetry, and understand what's actually happening in the environment, not just assign tickets.
- Automation and toil reduction: champion scripting and automation (PowerShell, Python) to eliminate repeat work, improve run-book quality, and shorten MTTR.
- Team leadership: manage, coach, and develop a small operations team; own staffing, on-call rotation, and workload balance.
What You Bring
- Demonstrated experience managing or leading application production support for a business-critical, customer-facing platform. This is non-negotiable - we're looking for someone who has lived in a production environment, not a project or build-phase background.
- Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Azure - App Services, SQL, monitoring/Log Analytics, identity, networking basics.
- Comfort with .NET application hosting concepts: configuration, deployment slots, typical failure modes, and what "healthy" looks like.
- Hands-on scripting and automation in PowerShell and/or Python. You don't need to be a full-time developer, but you should be able to read, write, and maintain operational scripts.
- Practical experience with pipeline deployments, ideally in Azure DevOps - release pipelines, approvals, artifacts, and the coordination problems that come with them.
- Fluency with ITIL-style incident, problem, and change processes and the ticketing tools that support them (ServiceNow, Jira, or similar).
- Executive presence on a bridge - calm, organized, clear communication under pressure, including directly with client stakeholders.
Nice to Have
- Prior experience supporting public sector, state government, or regulated industry workloads.
- Azure certifications (AZ-104, AZ-400) or ITIL v4 Foundation.
- Exposure to SRE practices - SLOs, error budgets, observability tooling.
Why This Role
You'll be the operational anchor for a platform that touches nearly every resident of the state it serves. The work is visible, the stakes are real, and the environment is stable and long-running - this isn't a short-term project role. You'll have a defined team, a clear mandate, and an established client relationship to build on.