LCG is looking for an Azure Architect/SME with technical expertise to design architecture for a hybrid environment with on-premise and cloud infrastructure, and business acumen to understand and translate the current and future business needs to technical specifications for systems engineers and application developers. The senior SME defines the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions needed to meet the customer’s needs and future state of compute, storage, availability, scalability, and integration needs.

Essential Responsibilities: 

• The cloud SME will be responsible for facilitating discovery sessions with both business and technical teams to review current business needs, infrastructure, processes and gather requirements for future enterprise needs and design architecture and solutions to meet the same. 
• Collaborate with systems engineering and application development teams to develop, define and document architectural principles, patterns, guidelines, and standards. 
• Identify impacts of the architectural design and work to resolve system dependencies and conflicts; The cloud SME will define a clear path to bridge the gap from current state of the a to the proposed future state as defined by enterprise architecture.
• Daily coordination and communication with Stakeholders, which includes COTR and Federal Project Managers on tasks, projects, and new initiatives. Establish and maintain excellent customer relationships through timely correspondence and meeting coordination to mitigate risks and achieve objectives. Provide guidance in the areas of capacity planning, strategic planning, and emerging technologies, and process improvements. Work closely with the team to develop methodology and process wiki; technical staff training plan; and support and oversight on key projects. 
• Deploy and maintain Azure IaaS Virtual Machines and Azure Application and Networking Services to support growth into the cloud. 
• Provision Dev /Test / Stage / Prod Infrastructure as code using Azure CLI PowerShell ARM templates and or terraform. 
• Build and Manage Azure DevOps pipelines for CI CD and Release Management workflows. Manage Azure DevOps repos and branch policies. 
• Define and implement the configuration of Azure PAAS and IAAS services for high availability data redundancy data loss prevention site recovery and resilience. 
• Define and implement the configuration of Azure PAAS and IAAS services for high throughput and scale with capacity planning load balancing strategies. 
• Manage the security architecture to ensure data security at rest and in transit application security key management identity management authentication and authorization with OIDC and OAuth2 infrastructure security with Azure VNETs NSGs UDRs etc. 
• Implement observability patterns using Azure Monitor Azure Application Insights and Log Analytics Workspace. 
• Optimize Azure buildouts for cost/performance (VM optimization, reserved instances, etc.) 

Knowledge Skills and Abilities: 

• Embraces Teamwork and Open Communication 
• Superior communication and presentation skills.
• Ability to listen, understand and translate client requirements. 
• Demonstrated experience in delivering effective infrastructure solutions.
• Strategic planning skills, organizational skills, operating skills, and strong leadership 
• Hands on knowledge of Microsoft and Active Directory, SQL, VMWare technologies, SharePoint collaboration, IIS, load-balancing and high-availability architectures, and public web hosting. 
• Extensive experience with servers, compute, storage, operating systems and backup solutions. 
• Strong scripting skills (PowerShell, bash).
• Extensive Windows 2019 Server Management 
• Azure CLI, PowerShell, and ARM Templates / Terraform experience. 
• Azure Networking Azure Virtual Networks ExpressRoute, Site to Site VPN, NSG, App Service Environments 
• Azure DevOps configuration and management 
• Azure PAAS Services Security and Provisioning 
• Cloud Security Azure Key Vault HSTS SSL TLS, Egress/Ingress Control, Azure Security Center Threat Detection 
• Cloud monitoring Experience with Azure Log Analytics, Azure Monitor, Application Insights. 
• Experience with security (server hardening, two factor authentication, SSL, VPN); 

 Requirements Technical Experience and Education: 

• 5 years of experience designing and supporting Azure environments, including IaaS and PaaS 
• Microsoft Azure Certification (MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure or equivalent) 
• Hands-on experience using the Azure administration portal. 
• Bachelor's degree (in Computer Science, Math or Engineering) 
• Demonstrable experience deploying enterprise workloads to Azure. 
• Proficiency with PowerShell, Python, or other scripting languages 
• Hands-on experience with one or more configuration management systems such as Ansible, Chef, or Puppet 
• Experience designing and supporting enterprise core services as well as cloud deployments of these services. 
• Extensive knowledge of Microsoft Enterprise software products and services