Senior Infrastructure Analyst

The role:

We are looking for a Senior Cloud Infrastructure Analyst to join our IT department in Bristol.

At Simmons & Simmons, technology is central to delivering exceptional client service. We are seeking a talented and motivated Senior Cloud Infrastructure Analyst to join our Platforms team and help build, automate and operate the Azure platform underpinning our applications and services.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on designing and delivering secure, scalable and resilient cloud solutions in Microsoft Azure, using Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD automation as the default approach. You will work closely with architects, security and application teams to implement cloud platform patterns and enable delivery teams to deploy safely and consistently. You will be required to act as senior technical authority within the platforms team, supporting decision-making, mentoring engineers, and shaping the Azure roadmap.

What will you do:

Azure Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & CI/CD automation

• Build, deploy, and maintain Azure infrastructure using IaC (Bicep and/or Terraform) with peer review and version control.
• Strong familiarity working in IaC and pipelines to ensure quality, security and adherence to baseline standards.

Cloud reliability, operations & incident/problem support (engineering-led)

• Act as a senior escalation point for complex Azure platform incidents; leading to troubleshoot, perform root cause analysis, and implement sustainable fixes (automation over repeated manual intervention).
• Monitor and improve platform health using Azure observability tooling (e.g., Azure Monitor, Log Analytics/KQL, Application Insights, Science Logic), and improve alerting and diagnostics.
• Lead reliability and resilience improvements such as such as performance tuning, resource optimisation, cost optimization using Fin Ops and provide availability enhancements, aligned to our service- level expectations.
• A senior analyst is expected to be a point of contact and escalation at all times, taking ownership of incident management, while providing 3rd & 4th level and technical support.
• Any experience working within the Agile framework using Scrum.

Security, compliance & governance

• Embed security controls and compliance checks into delivery pipelines (Dev Sec Ops  approach), ensuring cloud systems are configured securely and remain compliant.
• Contribute to platform governance initiatives such as naming/tagging conventions, logging standards, Key Vault/secret patterns, and controlled change via Github Push/Pull requests.
• Work closely with Security and CISO stakeholders and the wider networks team to maintain a strong and compliant security posture across our Azure public cloud.

What we are looking for:

The role deliberately covers a relatively broad brief of technologies, targeted at enabling effective communication and efficient working practices. We would expect the role holder to be able to demonstrate a skill base that spans a range of the following topics and, where necessary, to demonstrate the aptitude and desire to develop to meet the entire brief.

• Knowledge of a range of enterprise IT application technologies, including a demonstrated track record in operating and administering or working with infrastructure applications as part of the:
  Microsoft Application Stack such as Exchange 365;
  Active Directory, AD connect, Azure site recovery (ASR) and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Azure SQL.
• Experience of working with VMware vSphere, HPE Servers & Storage, upgrades and maintenance procedures.
• Hands-on experience engineering solutions in Microsoft Azure, including a solid understanding of Azure IaaS and PaaS services (e.g., VMs, Storage, App Services, Front Door, API Management, Azure Functions, Azure SQL, Azure Networking).
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code in either (Bicep and/or Terraform; ARM knowledge acceptable where relevant).
• Practical experience with Azure Dev Ops (Pipelines, Repos, CI/CD concepts) and Git-based version control.
• Azure networking knowledge including VNETs, vWAN, Express Route, VPN gateways, hub-and-spoke, and traffic management concepts.
• Azure security fundamentals including Managed…