Senior Azure Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Role Overview

Senior Azure Cloud Infrastructure Engineer for a government client in Bethesda, MD. This is a contract-to-hire position with a remote work model for candidates located in the DC/VA/MD (or surrounding) areas and eligible to obtain a Public Trust clearance. You’ll join a DevOps team responsible for building and operating enterprise infrastructure for on-prem and cloud hosting, including support for a custom ChatGPT-like model for the intramural community.

Responsibilities

• Design, secure, and implement Azure cloud infrastructure for multi-modal LLM and RAG-based architectures.
• Work with Azure AI services such as Azure AI Foundry, vector indexing, knowledge source integration, and distributed cloud AI services.
• Support evolving AI/agent capabilities (e.g., agentic capabilities), MCP integrations, and enterprise knowledge connectivity.
• Use automation and codify best practices to improve scalability, resiliency, and operational efficiency.
• Streamline system administration through scripting, configuration management, and modern operations practices.
• Apply “second-order thinking” to assess architectural and decision impacts over short/medium/long term.
• Engineer and recommend CI/CD pipelines; run security scans and perform application health checks.
• Monitor performance, reliability, and cost optimization with logging/telemetry, incident response, and governance.
• Support compliance/audits by providing artifacts for NIST 800-53 rev5 and maintaining an Authority to Operate (ATO).

Requirements

• BS/BA (or equivalent).
• 10+ years related experience.
• Strong written/communication skills and troubleshooting ability.
• Hands-on experience in system administration, automation frameworks, patch management, monitoring, certificate management, and data protection/backup.
• Hands-on Azure experience including:
  • Implementing/supporting Azure AI Foundry
  • Serverless compute
  • Vector databases/search platforms
  • Knowledge integration architectures (RAG patterns preferred)
  • RBAC, identity management, and conditional access via Azure AD / Entra ID
  • Monitoring/performance tuning using Azure Monitor and Log Analytics
  • Network components: Load Balancers, VNets, API gateways, Firewalls, Route Tables
• CI/CD pipeline design and implementation.
• Infrastructure-as-Code experience with ARM templates and/or Terraform; ability to write custom modules.

Preferred Skills

• Experience managing/integrating AI models and tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and DALL-E.