Azure Senior Technical Lead — Landing Zone, Terraform & Migration
Practice
Cloud & Infrastructure, Avanade India
Location
Bengaluru/Gurugram, India (Hybrid)
Experience
10–12 years overall in cloud infrastructure and platform engineering, with deep hands-on experience designing and provisioning Azure services through Terraform, building enterprise landing zones from scratch, delivering workload migrations, and leading a small engineering team
Role Summary
Avanade India’s Cloud & Infrastructure practice is looking for an Azure Senior Technical Lead to design and build enterprise Azure platforms for our clients. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for a seasoned Azure specialist — someone who designs the landing zone from scratch and then writes the Terraform that provisions it, rather than handing the design over to someone else.
You will lead platform workstreams end to end: target-state design, landing zone build, workload migration to Azure, and the security, governance and operational guardrails that make the platform safe to run at scale. You will lead a team of two to four engineers, own the technical quality of what they deliver, and act as the client-facing technical authority on the engagement.
Key Responsibilities
- Design enterprise Azure landing zones from the ground up, aligned to the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected Framework — management group hierarchy, subscription and environment strategy, networking, identity, security, governance and operations.
- Design and provision Azure services hands-on using Terraform — authoring, structuring and maintaining modules, root configurations, remote state and provider configuration to a production standard.
- Lead a team of two to four engineers through the landing zone build — allocating work, reviewing code and designs, unblocking the team and owning the quality of what is delivered.
- Lead workload migration to Azure — discovery and assessment, wave planning, migration design (rehost, replatform, refactor), execution, cutover, rollback and post-migration optimisation.
- Design and configure core platform services: hub-and-spoke or Virtual WAN networking, hybrid connectivity (ExpressRoute/VPN), private DNS, Azure Firewall, routing, private endpoints, compute, storage and backup.
- Design identity and access for the platform — Entra ID integration, RBAC model, managed and workload identities, and privileged access.
- Define and implement platform governance — Azure Policy, initiatives and guardrails, management group structure, subscription vending, naming and tagging standards, and cost management.
- Establish security and operations baselines: Defender for Cloud, Key Vault and secrets management, backup and DR patterns, monitoring and alerting, and Azure Monitor/Log Analytics design.
- Own the DevOps set-up required to deliver the landing zone — repository and branching strategy, CI/CD pipelines for Terraform in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, plan/apply gating, approvals, secrets handling and drift detection.
- Set and enforce engineering standards — module design and versioning, repo structure, code review discipline, validation and security scanning (tflint, Checkov/tfsec or equivalent).
- Act as design authority on the engagement — chairing design reviews, resolving architecture escalations, reviewing the client architect’s design and pushing back where it is incomplete.
- Carry knowledge transfer to the client’s own team, and mentor and uplift Avanade engineers on the platform.
- Support presales and pursuits as the platform SME: solution architecture, effort estimation, migration approach, delivery plans and client-facing technical workshops.
- Contribute reusable Terraform modules, reference architectures and accelerators to the practice IP library.
Required Skills & Experience
- 10–12 years of overall experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering or infrastructure architecture, with a substantial recent focus on Microsoft Azure.
- Proven experience designing and building enterprise Azure landing zones end to end — designing the platform, not just consuming one someone else built.
- Deep hands-on expertise with Terraform — writing and structuring reusable modules, managing state at scale, handling providers and dependencies, and running Terraform in automated pipelines.
- Strong breadth across Azure configuration and operations: compute, networking, storage, databases, backup, monitoring, and the platform services that migrated workloads depend on.
- Strong Azure networking depth: hub-and-spoke and Virtual WAN topologies, ExpressRoute and VPN, NSGs/UDRs, Azure Firewall, Private Link and Private Endpoints, DNS design.
- Solid grounding in Azure identity, security and governance: Entra ID, RBAC, managed identities, Key Vault, Azure Policy, Defender for Cloud, and enterprise compliance requirements.
- Proven delivery of workload migrations to Azure at enterprise scale — assessment, wave planning, execution and cutover — from on-premises datacentres or other cloud providers.
- Hands-on DevOps capability for infrastructure delivery — Azure DevOps Pipelines or GitHub Actions, Git workflows, code review discipline and pipeline-driven deployment.
- Scripting capability in PowerShell and/or Python for automation, tooling and operational tasks.
- Demonstrated experience leading a small engineering team — allocating work, reviewing code and designs, and holding technical quality on medium-to-large engagements.
- Strong client-facing communication skills, including the ability to defend architecture decisions with senior client stakeholders and architecture review boards.
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Preferred / Good to Have
- Microsoft certifications: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305), Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104), Azure Network Engineer Associate (AZ-700) or Azure Security Engineer Associate (AZ-500); HashiCorp Terraform Associate.
- Experience with Azure Landing Zone accelerators (Terraform ALZ modules / Enterprise-Scale) and with platform-team operating models.
- Experience running structured knowledge transfer and enablement for a client’s platform team.
- FinOps experience — cost modelling, showback/chargeback and ongoing platform cost optimisation.
- Exposure to AWS or GCP for comparative positioning and cloud-to-cloud migration scenarios.
- Experience with Kubernetes and AKS platform design, including GitOps delivery (Flux/ArgoCD).
- Experience in regulated or compliance-heavy environments (BFSI, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, public sector) and with data residency requirements.
- Experience in a global delivery / SI environment (Avanade, Accenture, or similar) working with distributed teams across geographies.
- Prior contribution to reusable accelerators, Terraform module libraries or reference architectures.
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