Lead Azure Engineer in Sheffield

This role leads the design and delivery of cloud-native, full stack products on Microsoft Azure, running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). You will be hands-on across the stack while setting technical direction, strengthening engineering standards, and ensuring solutions are secure, resilient, observable, and straightforward to operate in production.

Responsibilities

• Lead full stack delivery across React (TypeScript) front-end applications and Java/Python back-end services, including microservices and APIs.
• Own cloud-native solution design for AKS-based platforms, defining service boundaries, resilience patterns, scaling approaches, deployment strategies, and operational readiness.
• Design, build, and operate back-end services using Java (Spring Boot) and/or Python (FastAPI/Flask), covering API design with OpenAPI, performance optimisation, and security controls.
• Develop modern user interfaces with React, focusing on accessible design, reusable components, and efficient state management.
• Design and maintain Kubernetes deployments on AKS, including manifests, ingress configuration, autoscaling, configuration and secrets management, service-to-service communication, and rollout/rollback patterns.
• Implement and maintain DevSecOps practices using Azure DevOps, building CI/CD pipelines with automated quality gates such as unit and integration tests, SAST/DAST where applicable, and dependency scanning.
• Drive observability and production excellence by implementing logging, metrics, and tracing, creating actionable alerts, defining SLOs and SLIs, and leading incident response and post-incident improvement activities.
• Embed security by design through secure coding practices, threat modelling, role-based access control and least privilege, secrets management including Key Vault integration, and modern identity patterns using OAuth2 and OIDC.
• Coach and uplift engineers across the stack by leading code and design reviews, mentoring, driving consistent standards, and actively reducing technical debt.
• Collaborate closely with product, architecture, UX, QA, and platform teams to plan delivery, manage risk, and ensure successful outcomes.
• Set clear technical direction, making well-reasoned trade-offs between speed and sustainability.
• Build an inclusive engineering culture where diverse viewpoints are welcomed and used to improve outcomes.
• Take accountability for delivery and production stability, focusing on root causes rather than temporary workarounds.
• Maintain delivery momentum by removing blockers, simplifying complex processes, automating where possible, and helping the team ship high-quality software.

Essential Skills

• Significant experience in Senior Lead or Lead Engineer roles delivering and operating production systems.
• Strong hands-on engineering background in Java, including Spring Boot, REST APIs, testing strategies, and performance tuning.
• Strong hands-on experience with Python for service development and automation, preferably using FastAPI or Flask.
• Proven experience building and maintaining front-end applications with React, ideally using TypeScript, modern hooks, and robust front-end testing approaches.
• Demonstrable experience running workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), with solid understanding of Kubernetes fundamentals such as deployments, services, ingress, configmaps, secrets, and horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA).
• Practical experience with containerisation using Docker and packaging and deployment of containerised workloads.
• Experience designing and executing release strategies, including blue/green deployments, canary releases, rolling upgrades, and rollback planning.
• Strong experience with Azure DevOps, including CI/CD pipeline design and implementation for build, test, and deploy stages, approvals, and environment management.
• Good understanding of repository hygiene, branching strategies, and maintaining high-quality pull requests.
• Solid understanding of security, reliability, and operability in a regulated or enterprise environment.
• Experience applying DevSecOps practices including SAST and DAST, and dependency scanning within CI/CD pipelines.
• Practical knowledge of modern identity and access management, including OAuth2 and OIDC.

Additional Skills & Qualifications

• Experience with Azure services commonly used alongside AKS, such as Azure Container Registry (ACR), Key Vault, Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, API Management (APIM), and Service Bus or Event Hubs.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools, particularly Bicep or Terraform.
• Understanding of service mesh technologies and policy controls, as well as network security patterns including private endpoints and ingress controls.
• Strong background in domain-driven design and event-driven architecture.
• Experience leading cross-functional engineering teams and influencing technical direction.
• Ability to balance short-term delivery needs with long-term sustainability and maintainability.

Why Work Here?

You will join a culture that values strong engineering practices, inclusive collaboration, and continuous improvement. The environment encourages ownership of technical decisions, supports mentoring and skills development, and recognises the importance of secure, reliable, and well-operated systems. You will have the opportunity to shape engineering standards, work with modern cloud-native technologies, and contribute to an environment where thoughtful trade-offs and sustainable delivery are genuinely appreciated.

Work Environment

You will work in a modern cloud-native environment built on Microsoft Azure and Azure Kubernetes Service, using technologies such as Java (Spring Boot), Python (FastAPI/Flask), React with TypeScript, Docker, and Azure DevOps for CI/CD. The role involves close collaboration with product, architecture, UX, QA, and platform teams in a setting that emphasises observability, security, and production excellence. The engineering culture promotes inclusive teamwork, high code quality, and automation across the delivery lifecycle.

Location: Sheffield, UK

Rate/Salary: 400.00 - 550.00 GBP Daily