Azure DevOps Engineer (must have 10+ years of experience)

Thank you for stopping by to take a look at the DevOps Engineer role I posted here on LinkedIN, I appreciate it. If you have read my JD's before, you will remember that I like to add some humor to these things (life is too short to not laugh once in a while). If you are new to my JD's, if you see something in here that makes you chuckle...that was the intent. So, no bots...no AI, just an actual person.

Before we go further:

• I am not working with external vendors for this role. Please do not call me 50 times or send me 100 emails saying you have an 'ideal candidate'. I am not working with external vendors for this role.
• The client for this role cannot provide immigration sponsorship now or in the future. As a result, I’m only able to work with candidates who have permanent authorization to work in the U.S. and will never require sponsorship (typically U.S. citizens or Green Card holders). With that in mind, I cannot work with candidates that require employer sponsorship at any point to continue working in the U.S., including under H1, H4, F1, EAD, STEM, OPT, or other time-limited work authorization
• This is a contract to hire role. The contract period will last approximately 6 months. Once converted to perm, annual comp for this role will range from 130,000 to 145,000/yr. Once converted to perm, the role will be fully benefitted. However, during the contract period, no employee benefits are available.
• Yes, this role is being done remotely. However, candidates based in Chicago or the midwest in general will be preferred.

As with almost all the roles I work on, that 'social fit' is almost as important as the 'technical fit'. This role is no different. So, you might ask what are some of those 'social fit' pieces to this role? Well, I am glad you asked. Here are some of them:

• This is an environment where they thrive on consistent and constant learning. So, that ability to continue to not just gain knowledge, but share it will be needed for success in this role.
• This is not a highly dramatic environment. If you believe the entire world revolves around you, I am going to suggest you run for Congress. I hear there is a race going on.

This role is for a highly skilled Azure DevOps Engineer with lots of experience designing Azure environments and resources, creating those nifty templates to deploy those Azure resources, creating those Azure private endpoints, as well as creating & maintaining those PowerShell (or other scripting) scripts. I realize that their are parallels between Azure, AWS and GCP, however we we are really only seeking candidates with lots of Azure experience.

As you look across those critical first 30, 60, 90 days and 6 months of this role, here is what success looks like:

30 days - consuming where this client is and make suggestions from a DevOps environment standpoint. This will include complete comprehensive assessment with prioritized transformation roadmap and quick wins identified.

60 days - building pipelines and gaining a solid understanding of improvements that could be made

90 days - true ownership of this clients DevOps environment. This will include automated staging deployments, improved monitoring and alerting, and full ownership of release process established

6 months - Frequent automated production releases achieved while maintaining or reducing deployment incidents and rollback time

You will be the only DevOps engineer for this team and work with 7 developers and 2 QA individuals. So, that ability to not have to be 'told what to do' is critical...we are seeking that person who already knows what to do.

Here are some of the nifty things you will be working on (I am not a huge fan of a laundry list of 1,000 things that someone will be doing. I am willing to bet your eyes kind of bug out and perhaps you even chuckle a bit at the laundry list job descriptions...so, I will narrow these down into the main responsibilities for this role):

• Rebuild and mature our CI/CD pipeline infrastructure to enable frequent, safe production releases with automated quality gates.
• Design and implement advanced deployment strategies including blue-green deployments, canary releases, and feature flags.
• Architect comprehensive rollback mechanisms that minimize mean time to recovery.
• Develop infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform or Azure Bicep to ensure consistency across all environments.
• Build robust observability solutions with clear SLIs and SLOs that provide actionable insightsIntegrate security scanning, vulnerability detection, and secrets management throughout the CI/CD pipeline.
• Lead CI/CD maturity assessment and transformation roadmap with engineering leadership
• Lead site reliability engineering practices including incident response and reliability improvements.

Here are some of the main requirements (I am going to be far more focused on breath & depth of experience than I will be in years of experience. Realistically, we are seeking 4 or more years of experience, however) All of these are gotta haves:

• At least 10+ years in Azure DevOps roles with proven experience building and scaling next-level CI/CD systems. We are looking for individuals that were the only DevOps engineer in their roles as opposed to those that were a part of a team (this is a gotta have). Granted Azure DevOps formally has been around since 2018, but it's predecessor TFS has been around since 2007. So, yep, I am accommodating that - prior to 2018, you probably had TFS experience....
• Expert-level proficiency with Azure DevOps including YAML pipelines, release gates, and environments
• Strong proficiency with infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform or Azure Bicep
• Production experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes/AKS)
• Demonstrated track record implementing deployment automation, monitoring solutions, and GitOps workflows
• Scripting expertise with Python, PowerShell, or Bash
• Experience with observability tools (Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Prometheus, Grafana)
• Understanding of security best practices including secrets management and compliance automation
• Knowledge of deployment patterns (blue-green, canary, rolling updates) and when to apply each