Senior Azure Cloud Architect with AZ-305, AZ-104, and AZ-500 certifications

Senior Azure Cloud Architect

Project Identifier NEA

Project Name Cloud Infrastructure & Modernization

Client National Endowment for the Arts

Agency NEA

Location Hybrid (1 day per week on-site at NEA Washington DC)

Interview Type MS Teams

Contract Duration 2 years with Possible extension

Tentative Start Date Immediate

Deadline Immediate

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Office of Information & Technology Management, operates

and continues to modernize its enterprise environment on Microsoft Azure. The agency requires a Senior

Azure Cloud Architect to own the design, governance, security posture, and migration of workloads across

Azure compute, storage, networking, identity, data, and integration services.

This position specifically requires both deep hands-on Azure engineering and architecture-level design in

a single individual. The Architect will produce reference architectures, diagrams, and architecture decision

records that engineering teams can implement directly; define infrastructure as code standards for the

team; lead architecture review boards and design authority meetings; and drive enterprise-scale landing

zone design and governance aligned to the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and the Azure Well-Architected Framework.

The Architect shall be adept at interpersonal communications, teamwork, goal setting, and business

process improvement, and shall be comfortable translating business requirements into technical designs

and presenting solution designs and tradeoffs to CIOs, CTOs, and senior leadership.

Work effectively with federal and contractor personnel to execute the project tasks;

Collaborate with NEA and other federal staff and contractors to refine and elaborate requirements;

Design enterprise-scale Azure solutions across compute services including Virtual Machines, VM

Scale Sets, App Services, Azure Functions, Container Apps, AKS, and Azure Batch, selecting the right

option for a given workload;

Architect advanced Azure networking spanning Virtual Networks, NSGs, UDRs, Private Endpoints,

Load Balancer, Application Gateway, Azure Firewall, Front Door, Virtual WAN, Express Route, and

VPN Gateway, including hub and spoke topologies and enterprise DNS strategy;

Design identity architecture using Microsoft Entra , including Conditional Access, Privileged

Identity Management, B2B and B2C scenarios, federation with on-premises Active Directory,

managed identities, and RBAC;

Innosoft is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer

Apply the Azure Well-Architected Framework across reliability, security, cost optimization,

operational excellence, and performance efficiency;

Implement Cloud Adoption Framework practices, including enterprise scale landing zone design and

governance blueprints;

Design multi region, highly available, and disaster resilient solutions with defined recovery time and

recovery point objectives;

Produce reference architectures, diagrams, and architecture decision records that an engineering

team can implement directly;

Lead workload assessments using Azure Migrate and map applications to the five Rs of rehost,

refactor, rearchitect, rebuild, and replace;

Perform wave planning for large scale datacenter exits, including dependency mapping and cutover

planning;

Define infrastructure as code standards and repository structure for the team, and review and

validate Bicep or Terraform code written by others;

Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines in Azure Dev Ops or Git Hub Actions, including artifact

management, secret scanning, and pipeline security hardening;

Implement release strategies including blue and green, canary, and ring based deployments;

Operate production AKS clusters, including upgrades, node pool management, and networking

through Azure CNI or Calico, with Helm chart authoring and Git Ops workflows using Flux or ArgoCD;

Implement security, compliance, and governance using Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft

Sentinel, and Key Vault with secret rotation, together with Azure Policy, Management Groups, and

Blueprints, applying Zero Trust principles across identity, network, and data layers;

Configure Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application…