Manager, Cloud Platform Engineering (Houston)

Crescent is a differentiated U.S. energy company committed to delivering value through a disciplined, returns-driven growth through acquisition strategy and consistent return of capital. Our long-life, balanced portfolio combines stable cash flows from low-decline production with a deep, high-quality development inventory. Crescent is a top three producer (by gross operated production) in the Eagle Ford basin. Crescent’s leadership is an experienced team of investment, financial and industry professionals that combines proven investment and operating expertise. For more than a decade, Crescent and our predecessors have executed on a consistent strategy focused on cash flow, risk management and returns.  Through disciplined and accretive investments, we have successfully tripled the size of our company since going public in December 2021 while maintaining a strong balance sheet. We are seeking an experienced Manager, Cloud Platform Engineering to lead the people, strategy, and engineering behind Crescent Energy’s Microsoft Azure platform. This is a hands-on leadership role responsible for the cloud foundation that enterprise applications, data, and operational technology services depend on, and for turning that foundation into a self-service platform that engineering teams across the company can build on with speed and confidence.Crescent Energy operates a large, distributed oil and gas environment built through steady growth and acquisition, with corporate offices, field operations, production sites, and operational technology systems that increasingly rely on Azure-hosted services. The cloud platform is a critical backbone for this environment. The successful candidate must be equally comfortable leading and developing engineers, setting technical direction, treating the platform as a product with internal developers as its customers, and staying close enough to the work to review a Terraform module, resolve an identity issue, or guide an incident to resolution.This leader owns the strategy, roadmap, and daily operation of Crescent’s cloud platform, spanning Azure infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, Microsoft Entra ID and identity, governance and policy, reliability, and cost. The mandate is twofold. First, run and mature a secure, well-governed, and reliable Azure environment. Second, build the standardized, self-service capabilities, golden paths, reusable modules, and guardrails that let application and data teams provision and operate what they need without becoming cloud, identity, or networking experts. Success is measured not only by uptime and audit readiness, but by adoption, developer experience, delivery speed, reliability, and the unit economics of the platform.The ideal candidate will bring strong hands-on and architectural depth in Microsoft Azure, Terraform, and Microsoft Entra ID, along with real experience leading a platform, cloud, or infrastructure engineering team. This role partners closely with the Network Engineering, security, application, data, and operational technology teams, and leads a group that includes senior cloud engineers. While the CISO organization owns cybersecurity governance and security operations, the Cloud Platform Engineering team is responsible for engineering, automating, securing by default, operating, and continuously improving the Azure platform and the self-service experience built on top of it.Key ResponsibilitiesLead the Cloud Platform Engineering function responsible for Crescent’s Azure platform, including infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, identity, governance, reliability, and cost.Manage, mentor, and develop cloud and platform engineers, including senior engineers, while maintaining a strong hands-on technical presence.Set the platform strategy and roadmap, and treat the internal developer platform as a product, with internal developers as customers, clear adoption goals, feedback loops, documentation, and defined measures of success.Build and operate self-service capabilities, golden paths, reusable Terraform modules, templates, and guardrails that let application, data, and infrastructure teams provision and run Azure resources safely and consistently.Own the design, deployment, operation, and lifecycle management of enterprise-scale Azure infrastructure and shared cloud services.Lead Infrastructure as Code practices using Terraform, including module design, state management, versioning, code review, and deployment workflows.Direct Microsoft Entra ID engineering, including identity lifecycle, role-based access control, privileged access, conditional access, enterprise applications, and hybrid identity.Establish and enforce Azure governance through management groups, subscription design, landing zones, Azure Policy, tagging standards, and operational guardrails.Embed security into the platform by default, including least-privilege access, secrets management, policy-as-code, key and certificate management, logging, and control enforcement, in partnership with the CISO organization.Standardize and operate CI/CD pipelines and automation used to build, validate, and deploy platform infrastructure, and provide reusable delivery patterns for engineering teams.Establish the reliability practice for platform-owned services, including service level objectives, error budgets, monitoring, alerting, on-call readiness, incident response, blameless postmortems, and service continuity covering backup and disaster recovery.Mature observability across the platform using Azure Monitor and related tooling, with consistent metrics, logging, dashboards, and alerting standards.Lead the FinOps practice for cloud spend, including cost allocation and tagging, budgeting, forecasting, anomaly detection, rightsizing, commitment and rate optimization, showback, and unit economics, in partnership with finance and engineering teams.Define platform standards, configuration baselines, change control practices, documentation requirements, and operational runbooks.Troubleshoot complex cloud, identity, access, automation, networking, and reliability issues through to resolution, and lead root cause analysis and preventive action.Partner with Network Engineering on cloud and hybrid networking, including virtual networks, private connectivity, DNS, and network security controls in Azure.Participate in architecture reviews, project planning, vendor and tooling evaluations, infrastructure roadmaps, and M&A integration activities, including standardization of inherited cloud environments and reduction of technical debt.Maintain accurate platform documentation, including architecture diagrams, identity and access models, governance and tagging standards, runbooks, and audit evidence.QualificationsRequiredBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.10+ years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering, including deep hands-on Microsoft Azure experience in enterprise environments.Proven track record of leading and developing engineering teams (typically 4+ years), including hiring, mentoring, performance management, and growing senior engineers.Strong hands-on and architectural experience designing, operating, and securing enterprise-scale Azure infrastructure and shared platform services.Proven experience with Terraform for Infrastructure as Code, including module design, state management, versioning, and deployment workflows.Strong experience with Microsoft Entra ID engineering and administration, including RBAC, conditional access, privileged access, enterprise applications, identity governance, and hybrid identity.Demonstrated experience building self-service or platform-as-a-product capabilities, such as golden paths, reusable modules, templates, internal developer platforms, or paved-road patterns that reduce friction for engineering teams.Solid command of Azure governance, including management groups, subscription design, landing zones, Azure Policy, tagging, and operational guardrails.Strong cloud security experience, including least-privilege access, secrets management, policy-as-code, logging and monitoring, and control enforcement, with the ability to partner effectively with a security or CISO organization.Experience establishing and operating reliability practices, including service level objectives, error budgets, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and postmortems.Experience implementing FinOps or cloud cost management practices, including tagging and allocation, budgeting and forecasting, rightsizing, commitment optimization, and reporting.Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation used to deploy or validate Terraform-based infrastructure.Strong knowledge of cloud networking concepts, including virtual networks, peering, routing, private endpoints, VPN or private connectivity, DNS, and network security controls.Proficiency with at least one of PowerShell, Bash, or Python for cloud automation and operational scripting.Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders, and to drive adoption through clear value and well-designed defaults rather than mandates.Ability to operate with urgency, ownership, and sound judgment in an environment where platform availability supports enterprise and field operations.PreferredExperience supporting hybrid enterprise environments spanning on-premises infrastructure, Azure, and operational technology (OT) environments.Strong familiarity with operational technology, industrial systems, or regulated multi-site operating environments.Experience with Azure landing zones and the Cloud Adoption Framework, enterprise-scale architectures, and subscription-scale governance models.Experience integrating acquired cloud environments, rationalizing inherited infrastructure, and standardizing platfor