Senior Azure Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Job Title: Sr. Azure Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
Location: Bethesda, MD
Job Type: Contract to Hire
Contractor Work Model:REMOTE but must be located in the DC/VA/MD or surrounding areas
Security Clearance: candidates must be eligible to obtain a Public Trust

JOB OVERVIEW:
Seeking a Senior Azure Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to deliver innovative cloud solutions for a government client. Our program is responsible for designing, implementing, and managing enterprise infrastructure for hosting applications and solutions to include both on-prem and cloud. You will be a valuable member of a DevOps team, designing and implementing cloud infrastructure and automation, leveraging your deep technical knowledge to support a custom ChatGPT model for the intramural community to address scientific research challenges. Your ability to solve problems and collaborative approach will be instrumental in guiding the team towards scalable and efficient solutions that meet their evolving needs. If you’re passionate about crafting transformative solutions and thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative environment, consider joining our team.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Work closely with all relevant stakeholders to design, secure, and implement Azure cloud infrastructure solutions for multi-modal LLM and RAG-based architectures, including Azure AI Foundry, vector indexing, knowledge source integration, and distributed cloud AI services.
• Support evolving features such as agentic capabilities, MCP integrations, and enterprise knowledge connectivity.
• Use automation and codify best practices to enhance scalability, resiliency, and operational efficiency across cloud infrastructure.
• You will focus on streamlining system administration, reducing manual effort, and improving system reliability through scripting, configuration management, and modern ops methodologies.
• Use second-order thinking to identify the short, medium, and long term consequences of any architecture and decisions to identify risks, understand impact, meet requirements, and continue to drive customer value.
• Use your knowledge and experience with supporting application development lifecycles to recommend and engineer CI/CD pipelines to deploy code, conduct security scans and perform application health checks.
• Monitor system performance, reliability, and cost optimization, including logging, telemetry, incident response, and cloud resource governance.
• Participate in audits by providing artifacts to address NIST 800-53 rev5 controls and support the requirement to maintain an Authority to Operate (ATO).

• Education: BS/BA (or equivalent)
• Required Experience: Minimum of 10 years related experience
• Excellent written and communication skills
• Strong troubleshooting skills

• Minimum of 10 years’ experience as a cloud engineer with cloud and enterprise infrastructure technologies in a medium to large enterprise
• Hands-on experience in system administration, automation frameworks, patch management, monitoring, certificate management and data protection and backup approaches.
• Hands-on Azure experience to include:
  • Implementing and supporting Azure AI Foundry, serverless compute, vector databases/search platforms, and knowledge integration architectures (RAG patterns preferred).
  • Implementing and supporting RBAC, identity management, and conditional access policies via Azure AD / Entra ID
  • Monitoring and performance tuning using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Alerts
  • Deploying, managing, and troubleshooting network components such Load Balancers, Virtual Networks (VNets), API gateways, Firewalls, and Route Tables.
• Experience designing and building CI/CD pipelines
• Infrastructure-as-code experience to include experience with ARM templates and/or Terraform, writing custom modules from scratch, and helping guide and contribute to a large and growing codebase

• Experience managing and integrating AI models and tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and DALL-E.
• Experience working in a life-sciences oriented environment
• Writing code (PowerShell, Python, Ruby, etc.) from scratch to solve problems
• Experience using Git to manage shared software configuration code bases