Senior Azure Platform Engineer in Cardiff

The opportunity is to continue a significant transformation of our technology estate, moving towards a predominantly cloud-native operating model built around Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Fabric and the wider Microsoft cloud ecosystem.

The Senior Azure Platform Engineer will provide broad Azure platform engineering capability while also developing sufficient depth within Microsoft Fabric and data-platform technologies to provide resilience alongside our existing Cloud & Data Engineer.

The role offers:

• Significant ownership of a growing Azure environment.
• Hands-on involvement with Microsoft Fabric as it becomes a core enterprise data platform.
• The opportunity to shape our cloud engineering standards and practices.
• Significant scope for Infrastructure as Code and automation.
• Exposure to identity, networking, security, data, Microsoft 365 and Power Platform technologies.
• Direct involvement in cloud architecture and technology decision-making.
• The opportunity to lead technical projects rather than simply receive implementation tasks.
• A modernisation programme progressively reducing reliance on legacy and on-premises infrastructure.
• Close working relationships with senior IT leadership, engineers, data specialists and external technology partners.
• A senior technical career path that does not require moving into people management.

Day-to-Day Responsibilities:

• Azure Platform Engineering: Design, implement, maintain and improve services across the Azure estate. The role is not expected to personally administer every Microsoft technology but should have sufficient breadth to understand how services interact across a modern Microsoft cloud environment.
• Microsoft Fabric & Data Platform: Work alongside the existing Cloud & Data Engineer to provide engineering resilience for Microsoft Fabric. The role is not intended to replace BI developers or become responsible for business reporting and visualisation. Instead, it supports the engineering platform on which those capabilities operate.
• Infrastructure as Code & Automation, Integration: Help move the organisation towards repeatable, controlled and automated infrastructure management. The engineer should actively look for opportunities to replace fragile manual processes with reliable automation.
• Identity, Security & Governance: Work with IT leadership and other technology teams to ensure Azure platforms are appropriately secured and governed. The engineer will be responsible for technical implementation of security controls, working alongside governance and assurance functions rather than replacing them.
• Technical Project Delivery: Take technical ownership of projects and workstreams.
• Operational Engineering: Although primarily an engineering/project role, the position will also act as a senior escalation point for complex platform issues. This is not intended to be a traditional infrastructure support position, but senior engineers are expected to retain operational ownership of the platforms they build.

Technical Skills:

We are particularly interested in experience across the following areas:

• Azure: Azure architecture and administration, Azure networking, Azure identity and RBAC, Azure Monitor and Log Analytics, Azure Policy and governance, Key Vault, Private networking and Private Endpoints, Azure security and Defender, Azure storage and platform services, Backup, resilience and disaster recovery concepts.
• Engineering & Automation: Terraform and/or Bicep, PowerShell, Azure CLI, Git, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, Automated deployment and configuration management, DevOps engineering practices.
• Data Platforms: Experience with some combination of Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse, Data Lake technologies, Data pipelines and orchestration, Notebooks, Medallion/lakehouse architecture, Data-platform security and identity, Deployment and environment-management patterns.
• Microsoft Cloud: Useful wider exposure includes Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Defender, Power Platform, Microsoft Purview, Power BI/Fabric integration. Deep expertise across every Microsoft service is not expected.