GPS - Azure Senior Platform Engineer - Assistant Director

About the role

This role supports large, complex government cloud programs within Azure Government environments and is accountable for the successful delivery of platform and infrastructure capabilities at scale.

The Assistant Director owns outcomes across multiple workstreams, translating business and mission needs into secure, scalable, and sustainable cloud platforms. The role operates at the intersection of strategy and execution, guiding technical direction, enabling delivery teams, and influencing stakeholders across product, engineering, and platform organizations.

In addition to hands on technical leadership, the role is responsible for developing team capability, driving continuous improvement, and making informed trade offs to balance delivery, quality, risk, and long term platform health within government and security constrained environments.

Responsibilities

• Own the delivery of cloud platform and infrastructure capabilities across multiple initiatives, ensuring alignment with business, mission, and security requirements
• Set and guide technical direction for Azure Government platforms, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, and operationally sustainable
• Establish and evolve DevSecOps practices and automation approaches to improve delivery consistency, quality, and reliability
• Make informed technical and delivery trade off decisions, balancing speed, quality, security, risk, and long term platform health
• Lead architecture and design efforts, reviewing and approving solutions to ensure alignment with standards, constraints, and desired outcomes
• Oversee risk, dependency, and issue management across delivery efforts, escalating and resolving proactively as needed
• Influence stakeholders across product, engineering, and leadership teams to align priorities and drive execution without direct authority
• Develop and grow engineering talent through coaching, feedback, and delegation, strengthening overall team capability
• Promote operational excellence by continuously improving processes, tooling, and ways of working

Requirements

• Demonstrates accountability for outcomes, taking ownership of decisions and following through to execution
• Applies sound judgment when operating in ambiguity, making trade offs that consider delivery impact, risk, and long term sustainability
• Influences outcomes across teams and stakeholders through credibility, collaboration, and clear communication
• Communicates complex technical and delivery topics effectively to technical, business, and executive audiences
• Adapts approach as priorities, constraints, and requirements evolve while maintaining delivery momentum
• Develops people and teams by providing clear direction, timely feedback, and opportunities for growth
• Promotes a culture of quality, risk awareness, and continuous improvement
• Demonstrates curiosity and continuous learning, staying current with evolving technologies, delivery practices, and firm direction

Skills and attributes for success

• 7+ years in engineering roles working with private/public cloud IaaS, PaaS, and/or SaaS
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, or equivalent experience
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) and Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305)
• Strong hands-on experience:
• - Infrastructure as Code & CI/CD – designing and delivering with tools such as Bicep, Azure DevOps, ARM templates, or Ansible
• - Containers and orchestration – experience building and running containerized workloads using technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Container Apps, or Helm for packaging and deploying services at scale
• - Networking fundamentals – strong foundation designing and troubleshooting VNets, subnets, network security groups (NSGs), routing (UDRs), and basic load-balancing scenarios, with enough depth to reason about hub-and-spoke or similar topologies and diagnose common connectivity issues
• - Cloud security principles – solid understanding of concepts such as shared responsibility, least privilege, identity-driven security, network segmentation, encryption, and logging/monitoring, and how to apply them for customers driven by regulatory compliance requirements, such as: NIST, FedRAMP
• - Identity and access – understanding of Microsoft Entra ID, Azure RBAC, Entra ID RBAC, Privileged Identity Management (PIM), and managed identities for Azure resources
• - Windows and Linux administration – hands-on experience managing, troubleshooting, and hardening server workloads, including patching, performance tuning, and applying security baselines (e.g., DISA STIG or equivalent)
• - Scripting / programming – practical automation experience using PowerShell (Python or similar scripting languages is a plus but not required)
• - Experience with government security frameworks (e.g., NIST controls)
• - Hands-on delivery in Agile environments (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or similar)
• - Strong written and verbal communication and the ability to work effectively on distributed teams