Principal Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Jahnel Group•Schenectady, NY

2d•Remote

About The Position

Jahnel Group is seeking a Principal Cloud Infrastructure Engineer with deep experience in Microsoft Azure to take full ownership of the Azure environment, including architecture, security, reliability, and execution. This is a hands-on role where you will be the senior technical authority on infrastructure, working directly with the client's CTO and providing technical direction to a distributed DevOps team. You will be responsible for designing systems, raising engineering standards, and executing tasks while remaining accountable for production outcomes.

Requirements

7+ years in cloud infrastructure, SRE, or cloud security roles, with experience operating production systems.
4+ years deep, hands-on Azure experience in production SaaS environments.
Experience operating at Staff-level scope, shaping infrastructure decisions and standards.
Strong Terraform/Bicep experience at production scale (module design, environment structure, governance).
Proven experience designing cloud architecture, not just implementing existing designs.
Experience owning production systems, including uptime, reliability, and incident response.
Experience designing and executing disaster recovery strategies (RTO/RPO, restore procedures).
Strong hands-on experience across Azure core platform components (App Services, networking, managed databases, IAM, storage, monitoring, and logging).
Deep experience with Entra ID / Azure AD (RBAC, PIM, Conditional Access).
Strong understanding of cloud networking and security (segmentation, private endpoints, firewall/WAF, zero trust).
Experience designing or evolving infrastructure for multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
Experience designing or contributing to regional or multi-region architectures, including data residency considerations.
Experience in working with distributed or offshore engineering teams.
Experience mentoring team members or leading technical teams.
Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.

Nice To Haves

Experience managing PostgreSQL or other cloud databases.
Familiarity with Cloudflare (WAF, Access, Zero Trust).
Experience defining or implementing single-tenant deployment models.
Experience with Azure Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, or similar cloud security tooling.
Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes/AKS).
Experience supporting SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar frameworks (technical implementation).
Azure certification (AZ-305, AZ-500)
High ownership mindset with ability to operate independently, make decisions, and drive outcomes in a fast-moving environment.

Responsibilities

Own Azure architecture across all environments (prod, staging, dev).
Build, review & improve existing Terraform IaC.
Design and implement secure cloud landing zones (networking, IAM, governance).
Design and drive infrastructure patterns for environment separation, multi-tenant, single-tenant, and regional deployments.
Continuously work on improvement of Identity & Access Management (RBAC, PIM, Conditional Access).
Drive improvement of existing backup and disaster recovery capabilities (RTO/RPO), including testing and ensuring full environment rebuild from IaC.
Design and enforce network architecture (segmentation, private endpoints, firewall/WAF).
Lead infrastructure-related incident response, root cause analysis and production support.
Improve logging, monitoring, and alerting architecture.
Implement security controls in infrastructure aligned with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 requirements.
Provide technical direction and quality control for remote Platform/DevOps engineers.
Document current architecture, identify gaps, and drive improvements.
Optimize cloud cost, performance, and reliability.
Establish runbooks and operational processes.