Senior Cloud Engineer

📋 Job Overview

The Senior Cloud Engineer - Managed Services is responsible for leading the day-to-day operation, administration, monitoring, support, and continuous improvement of customer cloud environments across public Clouds such as Azure, AWS, GCP or OCI. This role is primarily focused on advanced cloud operations in Azure, ITSM execution, customer advisory, mentorship, and operational improvement, with secondary exposure to automation, DevOps, and reliability practices where they improve consistency, scale, and service quality. The role is expected to independently own complex and high-risk operational work, serve as a senior escalation point for major incidents and changes, and partner with architects on major design or platform engineering decisions as appropriate. There is an expectation of some travel and after-hours/weekend support in the event of major outages/issues, or when requested by the client for change windows (or similar events). Must have knowledge on Azure cost and FinOps strategies and have experience on FinOps practices. This is an on-site role, with core working hours aligned to Eastern Time (EST).

🏢 About AHEAD

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.

🎯 The Role

At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Lead the support and operation of cloud infrastructure, platform services, identity, networking, security controls, and operational tooling across customer environments.
• Able to architect and lead deployment of moderately complex solutions related to cloud solutions.
• Understands performance, scaling and functional characteristics of software technologies
• Ability to understand open-source and cloud use-cases, and recommend standard design patterns commonly used in such solutions (best practices).
• Own complex incidents, escalations, and problem investigations; perform advanced troubleshooting, coordination, service restoration, and follow-through to durable resolution.
• Plan and execute complex changes and recurring operational activities including provisioning, access changes, maintenance events, backup and recovery validation, patching coordination, and platform hygiene.
• Serve as a senior escalation point within the on-call rotation for major incidents, high-impact issues, and customer-approved after-hours change activity.
• Follow and reinforce established ITSM processes for incident, request, change, problem, escalation, documentation, and customer-facing status communication.
• Develop and maintain runbooks, SOPs, standards, knowledge articles, and technical documentation that improve consistency and service quality.
• Mentor other Cloud Engineers, review work for quality and completeness, and provide technical guidance on operational best practices.
• Drive monitoring, alerting, logging, tagging, policy, compliance, and cost-visibility improvements that strengthen managed cloud operations.
• Serve as the primary technical owner for customer Azure environments, including Azure landing zone governance, Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, Entra ID, and Azure cost/FinOps management.
• Use scripting, automation, and AI, to reduce repetitive effort, improve consistency, and scale service delivery.
• Apply DevOps/SRE tooling and practices (CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, source control, observability) where they improve reliability, consistency, and scale of managed cloud operations.
• Participate in customer meetings, service reviews, and advisory discussions; translate technical issues, risk, and improvement opportunities into clear business-facing communication.
• Other job duties as assigned.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Minimum Required - 5+ years in customer-facing IT infrastructure, cloud operations, systems administration, or managed services support, including work in production environments.
• Strong operational expertise in at least one major cloud platform, with the ability to lead complex support and administration activities in Azure.
• Experience leading complex incidents, escalations, change execution, and problem investigations in production environments.
• Experience with Windows and/or Linux server operations, networking fundamentals, identity and access management, monitoring, governance, and operational documentation.
• Strong working knowledge of PowerShell, Python, Bash, infrastructure as code, automation, CI/CD, or related platform tooling used to improve cloud operations.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience in a managed services, consulting, or multi-customer support environment, ideally supporting complex enterprise customers.
• Relevant advanced cloud, operations, or platform certifications are a plus, particularly Azure.

🎁 Benefits

Competitive

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived. We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD.