Azure Cloud Engineer

Cloud Engineer
Platform Engineering | View email address on click.appcast.io | Eli Lilly and Company
Position Summary
The Cloud Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining secure, scalable, and reliable cloud-based solutions. This role supports business objectives by optimizing cloud infrastructure, automating deployments, and ensuring compliance with security and performance standards.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure
- Design and deploy cloud architectures on Microsoft Azure that meet performance, security, availability, and cost-efficiency requirements for a diverse portfolio of enterprise and research applications.
- Architect and implement cloud networking, compute, storage, and identity constructs with security built in from the outset - applying least-privilege principles, network segmentation, encryption, and defense-in-depth across every layer.
- Evaluate and recommend cloud services, architectural patterns, and infrastructure approaches; build evidence-based adoption cases that account for engineering capability, operational cost, and long-term platform sustainability.
Automation & Deployment
- Implement and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) frameworks using Terraform, Ansible, Bicep, ARM templates, or equivalent - making infrastructure provisioning repeatable, auditable, and developer-friendly.
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for cloud infrastructure and application deployments; ensure changes are tested, validated, and deployed safely with automated rollback capability.
- Drive automation of operational tasks - patching, scaling, monitoring, alerting, and cost optimization - reducing manual intervention and improving platform reliability and response time.
Security & Compliance
- Ensure cloud environments comply with Lilly's security standards, regulatory requirements, and data governance policies; implement and maintain controls for identity management, secrets management, audit logging, and encryption at rest and in transit.
- Monitor cloud security posture continuously; identify and remediate misconfigurations, drift, and policy violations - integrating CSPM tooling into operational workflows for proactive compliance management.
- Partner with Cybersecurity teams to align cloud platform security with enterprise threat models and applicable regulatory frameworks including GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, and SOX where relevant.
Optimisation & Operational Excellence
- Monitor cloud environments for performance, availability, and cost efficiency; proactively identify waste, right-size resources, and drive FinOps practices that deliver cloud value without unnecessary spend.
- Contribute to platform engineering standards, reference architectures, and guardrails that simplify how development teams consume cloud infrastructure correctly and consistently.
- Troubleshoot and resolve cloud infrastructure issues with urgency and precision; contribute to post-incident analysis and implement preventive improvements that reduce recurrence.

Basic Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field - or equivalent professional experience.
- 3+ years of hands-on cloud engineering experience in a production enterprise environment (Microsoft Azure required).
- Demonstrated proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Bicep, ARM templates, or equivalent) and version control (Git).
- Proficiency in scripting languages (Python, Bash, or equivalent) for automation and tooling development.
- Strong understanding of cloud networking, virtualization, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud security principles.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices in a cloud-native context.

Preferred Qualifications

- Microsoft Azure certification strongly preferred - Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure Administrator Associate, or Azure DevOps Engineer Expert.
- Experience with FinOps practices and cloud cost optimization at enterprise scale.
- Familiarity with monitoring and observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, or equivalent).
- Experience in pharmaceutical, healthcare, life sciences, or other regulated industries - particularly with GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, or HIPAA cloud compliance requirements.
- Experience with Kubernetes in production (Azure Kubernetes Service / AKS or self-managed) including cluster operations and workload management.
- Background in cloud security architecture: IAM design, secrets management, network security groups, and cloud-native security tooling.

What You Should Bring

- Deep, hands-on cloud expertise - you build and operate production cloud infrastructure, and you hold yourself accountable for its reliability, security, and cost.
- Infrastructure-as-code as a default practice: you write Terraform or equivalent as naturally as you use the cloud console, and you understand why that matters for consistency, auditability, and scale.
- security-conscious engineering mindset - you design with least privilege, defense in depth, and compliance requirements built in from the start, not retrofitted under pressure.
- cost-conscious approach: you care about what cloud resources cost, you design systems that deliver value without unnecessary spend, and you proactively surface optimization opportunities.
- The communication skills to work effectively with developers who need platform guidance and business stakeholders who need to understand cloud investment decisions - and to adjust your language for each.