Senior Azure Platform / DevOps Engineer

Makai Labs; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Makai Labs seeks a senior cloud platform engineer to own Azure-based foundations, stand up new environments from scratch, and maintain complex Terraform-driven deployments across client environments.

You will size up unfamiliar setups, make critical architecture decisions, and ensure a secure, reliable platform. Collaboration with client DevOps teams and strong runbook documentation are essential.

Qualifications

• Azure experience is required; you’ve built and run production Azure environments.
• Terraform on Azure with proper state management and backends.
• Delivery path includes ACR, VM Scale Sets, and CI/CD with Azure DevOps or GitHub.
• Experience with Entra ID and RBAC across subscriptions.
• Strong writing and ability to share runbooks for live teams.

Responsibilities

• Stand up new platforms from scratch: network, compute, data, and pipelines.
• Make architecture calls and decide between in-place updates vs. destroy-and-replace.
• Lead migrations of live platforms to new foundations with rollback plans.
• Maintain platform health over time: upgrades, drift, security, and multi-client support.
• Collaborate directly with client DevOps engineers; explain plans and unblock failures.

Skills

Azure

Terraform

CI/CD

Azure DevOps

GitHub Actions

RBAC

Entra ID

Networking

Scripting (Bash/Python)

Tools

Azure DevOps

GitHub

Azure Container Registry

VM Scale Sets

Cloud-init

Private DNS Zones

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.