Senior Azure Platform / DevOps Engineer

Makai Labs; Massachusetts; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Makai Labs is seeking a senior Azure platform engineer to design, build and operate cloud platforms from a blank subscription. You will own the end-to-end architecture, including network, compute, data pipelines, and the supportive Terraform foundation, with a focus on safe in‑place updates versus destructive changes.

You will partner with client DevOps engineers, lead migrations to new foundations with proper runbooks and rollback plans, and maintain platform health through upgrades, drift

Qualifications

• Azure experience is the hard requirement.
• Production Azure environments experience preferred.
• Ability to size up unfamiliar setups and make confident architectural calls.

Responsibilities

• Stand up platforms from scratch: network, compute, data, and the pipeline to ship to them.
• Make architecture calls and manage in-place vs destroy‑and‑replace updates.
• Run migrations with real risk: plan, runbook, rollback ready before starting.
• Keep platforms healthy: upgrades, drift, security, and scalable foundations.
• Collaborate directly with client DevOps engineers to plan, unblock failures and communicate the plan.

Skills

Azure platform engineering

Terraform on Azure

Azure networking

CI/CD with Azure DevOps or GitHub

Azure data services

Entra ID & RBAC

Live-call communication/runbooks

Tools

Terraform

Azure DevOps

GitHub

Cloud-init

Postgres Flexible Server

Redis

Blob storage

Job description

About Makai

Makai uses best‑in‑class AI and data to solve real‑world operational and strategic challenges at scale. We help businesses with enterprise automation, human‑machine teaming, product design and development, and market intelligence. Until now, people have had to learn and adapt to software. Makai creates solutions that adapt to people because technology will never be 100% accurate. People are essential for all of our human‑machine teaming solutions.

About The Role

We build and run cloud platforms for our clients. A lot of the time that means standing up a reusable Terraform foundation and adapting it for each client and environment. You’ll own these platforms—design them, build them from an empty subscription, keep them running, and act as the person who actually knows how the whole thing fits together.

This is a senior role with a lot of trust attached. Clients differ, topologies differ, pipelines differ. What stays constant is Azure and the expectation that you can size up an unfamiliar setup, make the right calls, and own the result.

Ideal Candidate

• Stand up new platforms from scratch: network, compute, data, and the pipeline to ship to them.
• Make the architecture calls and live with them. That includes knowing when a Terraform change is a safe in‑place update and when it is a destroy‑and‑replace you should never run blind against production.
• Run migrations that carry real risk. Move a live platform onto a new foundation, read the plan correctly, write the runbook, and have a rollback ready before you start.
• Keep platforms healthy over time: provider upgrades, drift, security, and not letting a shared foundation rot as more clients land on it.
• Work directly with the client’s own DevOps engineers. Often they’re the ones running the apply and you’re advising, so you need to explain a plan, unblock a failure quickly, and be someone the engineer holding the keys trusts.

Qualifications

• Azure experience is the hard requirement. You’ve built and run production Azure yourself, not just used modules someone else wrote. Azure networking = VNets and subnets, private endpoints and private DNS zones, NSGs and UDRs, NAT, Application Gateway and WAF, load balancers, hub‑and‑spoke / Virtual WAN.
• Terraform on Azure, with state treated as something you respect: workspaces, migrations, imports, remote backends, and the discipline not to force an apply through a lifecycle guard.
• The delivery path: Azure Container Registry, VM Scale Sets and cloud‑init, and CI/CD with Azure DevOps or GitHub.
• Azure data services: Postgres Flexible Server, managed Redis, Blob storage, and a real sense of their sizing, failover, and cutover risks.
• Entra ID and RBAC: app registrations, service principals, role assignments scoped properly across subscriptions.
• Clear writing and a level head on a live call. You can hand someone a runbook they can follow without you in the room.

Nice‑to‑Haves

• Azure certs (AZ‑104, AZ‑305).
• Temporal or similar workflow runtimes, and scripting (Bash, Python) for the glue.
• Past consulting or client‑embedded work. You’ve been the outside expert before.

How We Work

Small senior teams, real ownership. We’d rather have one engineer who understands a platform top to bottom than several who each own a slice.