Principal Devops Engineer

We are looking for a Sr. Principal Devops Engineer. This is an onsite, full-time permanent hire position in Raleigh, North Carolina with our client. No visa sponsorship is available at this time or in the future for this position.

In this role as a Senior Azure DevOps Engineer, you will own the design and direction of our Infrastructure as Code, Azure CI/CD pipelines and serves as the primary technical bridge between the DevOps and application development teams.

As a Principal Azure DevOps Engineer, you are expected to operate with significant autonomy, make architectural decisions that affect multiple teams, and elevate the work of the engineers around them.

Responsibilities as a Principal Azure DevOps Engineer:

* Architect Azure DevOps YAML pipelines and reusable pipeline templates across the organization

* Lead the design, refactoring, and governance of our Bicep module library

* Establish module boundaries, parameter conventions, target-scope strategy, and versioning approach across subscriptions and environments

* Serve as the embedded technical partner for application development teams. Sit in design reviews, translate platform constraints into developer-friendly patterns, and translate developer needs into platform capabilities

* Drive measurable improvements in deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (DORA metrics)

* Build the instrumentation needed to prove it

* Partner closely with the Security team on Azure Policy and Defender posture

* Eliminate operational toil through self-service tooling

* Mentor DevOps I and II engineers and developers learning IaC. Review PRs as a teaching opportunity, not a gate. Write the ADRs, runbooks, and onboarding docs

* Lead post-incident reviews focused on systemic fixes. Participate in platform on-call rotation

Required Skills and Qualifications as a Principal Azure DevOps Engineer:

* 8+ years in DevOps, SRE, Platform, or Cloud Engineering, with at least 4 years focused on Azure at enterprise scale (multi-subscription, multi-environment)

* Deep, demonstrable expertise authoring Azure DevOps YAML pipelines — multi-stage pipelines, reusable templates, parameterized template libraries, deployment jobs, environments, approvals, and variable group strategy

* Production-grade Bicep authorship: modular design, parameter and output discipline, conditional deployments, all target scopes (resourceGroup, subscription, managementGroup, tenant), and integration with deployment stacks or ARM what-if workflows

* Strong PowerShell scripting for automation, remediation, and tooling. Comfortable with Az PowerShell modules and Microsoft Graph PowerShell

* Solid command of Git workflows and a clear point of view on branching, PR review, and release strategy at scale

* Working expertise across Azure core services: Entra ID, Key Vault, Storage, App Service, Functions, AKS or Container Apps, Application Gateway, Front Door, Log Analytics, and Azure Monitor

* Proven ability to work directly with application developers as a technical peer

* Experience setting standards and getting them adopted without formal authority — through code, documentation, and conversation

Nice to Have

* Microsoft certifications: AZ-400 (DevOps Engineer Expert), AZ-305 (Solutions Architect Expert), AZ-104