Senior Lead DevOps & Platform Engineer - Azure/AKS

Lunate; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Lunate is seeking a Senior Lead DevOps / SRE Engineer to own architecture delivery into production across our Azure estate. This hands-on role requires decomposing complex designs and landing secure, reliable platforms.

You will lead AKS platform engineering, manage IaC with Terraform and Ansible, build CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps, and establish SRE practices that keep our systems fast, observable, and resilient.

Qualifications

• 7 to 12 or more years of experience in DevOps, Platform, or SRE roles.
• Demonstrated ability to design complex systems or take a defined architecture and deliver it end-to-end into production with operational readiness.
• Strong hands-on experience operating and troubleshooting AKS in production, including upgrades, scaling, and security hardening.
• Strong experience with Docker and container tooling, including image build and optimisation, container registry management, vulnerability scanning, and Helm-based packaging.
• Expert-level experience with Terraform for infrastructure provisioning and lifecycle management.
• Strong experience with Ansible for configuration management and automation, including integration into CI/CD pipelines.
• Expert-level Azure DevOps pipeline engineering and release practices.
• Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, and PowerShell with an automation-first mindset.
• Strong operational experience across both Linux and Windows Server estates.
• Operational excellence experience covering monitoring and observability, incident response, postmortems, and SLO-driven decisioning.
• Experience with a mature observability stack across metrics, logs, and traces, including alert tuning at scale.
• Experience delivering in regulated environments where traceability and change governance are required, including release evidence, approvals, and segregation-of-duties patterns.
• Relevant certifications such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate, or Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert.

Responsibilities

• Translate reference architectures into production platforms with security and runtime considerations.
• Own end-to-end delivery of complex platform changes through design decomposition, implementation planning, engineering execution, and operational handover.
• Design, implement, and operate AKS clusters including upgrades, scaling, node pool strategy, cluster hardening, workload isolation, and performance optimisation.
• Build and maintain IaC frameworks using Terraform for provisioning and Ansible for configuration management.
• Create reusable modules, roles, and playbooks; enforce coding standards; manage drift; and integrate IaC into CI/CD workflows for controlled promotion across environments.
• Deliver end-to-end automation from infrastructure provisioning through post-provision configuration and hardening.
• Design and implement multi-stage Azure DevOps pipelines, deployment strategies, approval gates, artifact management, and rollback patterns.
• Standardise pipelines through reusable templates and documented patterns to improve quality, repeatability, and auditability.
• Own the release management operating model, including release planning, change control alignment, release communications, promotion sequencing, verification, and rollback readiness.
• Use reliability signals and operational readiness criteria to govern release confidence and reduce deployment risk.
• Develop automation and tooling in Python, Bash, and PowerShell to reduce operational toil and improve repeatability across build, deploy, monitoring, and incident response workflows.
• Operate and troubleshoot Linux and Windows Server environments.
• Define and operationalise SLIs, SLOs, and error budget policies to balance delivery velocity with service reliability.
• Lead incident response, establish runbooks, and drive blameless postmortems with measurable actions to reduce recurrence.

Skills

DevOps leadership

End-to-end delivery

AKS in production

Docker and container tooling

Terraform

Ansible

Azure DevOps

Python

Bash

PowerShell

Linux

Windows Server

Observability & SRE

Incident response

regulated environments

Tools

AKS

Terraform

Ansible

Azure DevOps

Helm

Docker

OCI runtimes

Job description

Lunate is seeking a Senior Lead DevOps / SRE Engineer to own architecture delivery into production across our Azure estate. This hands-on role requires decomposing complex designs and landing secure, reliable platforms.

You will lead AKS platform engineering, manage IaC with Terraform and Ansible, build CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps, and establish SRE practices that keep our systems fast, observable, and resilient.