Azure Infrastructure Lead

Newcastle upon Tyne | Hybrid, ideally two to three days per week onsite - flexible

We are recruiting an Azure Infrastructure Lead to support a well-known UK organisation as it begins the next phase of a major cloud transformation.

The organisation has retired its physical data centres and moved its remaining infrastructure into Azure. The foundations are now in place, but there is a significant opportunity to improve how the environment is automated, secured and designed.

You will take technical ownership of this next phase, working hands‑on while providing direction and support to an existing Azure engineer.

The environment includes Azure virtual machines, VNets, DNS, Active Directory services, NSGs and other shared infrastructure and compute services. Terraform has been introduced, but there is considerable scope to increase its use and move away from manually managed infrastructure.

The role could suit someone with particular strength in any one of three areas:

Azure infrastructure as code, particularly Terraform across VNets, VMs and shared services.

Azure security and network architecture, including traffic-flow discovery, NSGs and segmentation.

Cloud re-architecture and refactoring, including Azure SQL, scale-out compute, load balancing and moving traditional server workloads towards more cloud-native patterns.

You do not need to be a specialist in all three areas. The priority is someone with strong Azure infrastructure knowledge who can assess the environment, set direction and deliver practical improvements.

What you will be doing:

Leading the technical direction of the Azure cloud-hosting environment.

Creating and prioritising a practical infrastructure improvement roadmap.

Designing and delivering Azure infrastructure through Terraform.

Improving networking, security, resilience and operational automation.

Identifying opportunities to refactor traditional server-based workloads.

Supporting Fin Ops and cloud cost optimisation.

Mentoring and providing technical direction to an existing engineer.

Working with infrastructure, security and business stakeholders.

This is not primarily an application Dev Ops, web platform or CI/CD role. The focus is Azure infrastructure, compute, networking and shared services.

What we are looking for:

Experience with Azure networking, VNets, VMs, DNS and NSGs.

Technical leadership or architecture experience.

Experience taking work from discovery and design through to implementation.

Terraform experience, Azure infrastructure security experience or cloud-refactoring experience.

The ability to mentor engineers and communicate effectively with stakeholders.