Azure Engineering Manager

The salary for this role is £55,000.

Do you bring a wealth of experience in leading and mentoring technical teams in an Azure Engineering or Technical Manager/Lead capacity, with a comprehensive understanding of Identity, Integration, and DevOps practices?

Are to able to expertly oversee and manage intricate cloud-based systems, guaranteeing optimal uptime and performance?

Can you effectively communicate updates, challenges, and solutions to team members, stakeholders, and management, along with preparing insightful management reports?

If so, we’d love to hear from you!

At Livestock Information Ltd, our mission is to be an outstanding service provider of livestock data, empowering government, industry, and farmers to effectively manage disease and infection control, whilst enhancing productivity and innovation in agriculture. To achieve this, we need great people, who share in our values.

As a Azure Engineering Manager at LI, you will be responsible for an engineering team consisting of DevOps and Identity & Integration personnel.  The team provide critical break-fix support, and proactive system maintenance, ensuring continuous availability and optimal performance of systems and customer identity and integration services.

The successful candidate will lead a team that designs, implements, and manages DevOps practices and pipelines in Azure cloud environments with a strong focus on Security by Design principles and ensuring adherence to both the good industry and government security standards. In addition, you will guide Azure B2C identity management, API Management (APIM) of platforms, and SQL systems. 

The team play a key role in designing and managing continuous integration/continuous deployment. By working with cross-functional teams including development, operations, security and third parties, you will enable efficient, automated, secure, and scalable software delivery, alongside providing both proactive and reactive maintenance, and out-of-hours support with the aim to optimise infrastructure performance and costs, whilst ensuring continuous service improvement.

Responsibilities

Your responsibilities will include

• Leading the team to provide timely and efficient break-fix support to resolve system issues and minimise downtime in line with Service Level Agreements including out-of-hours.
• Ensure monitoring of system performance, availability, capacity, and infrastructure and code optimisation to ensure efficiency and reliability.
• Lead 3rd line support for Azure platform and customer identity & integration services, addressing escalated and complex issues, whilst coordinating with internal teams to maintain service uptime.
• Plan and provision workloads for service enhancements, projects and client service requests to efficiently support the dynamic business needs.
• Enforce security policies by conducting regular vulnerability assessments.  Ensuring the team patches and hardens systems as required whilst adhering to corporate Information Security Policies, Azure Security Benchmark and CIS controls.
• Collaboration with cross-functional teams (Development, Testing and third parties) to support, guide and offer technical guidance to software applications, identity & integration, and infrastructure implementations.  Ensuring robust and security frameworks are adhered to.
• Verify proactive monitoring of systems is in place and implement real-time monitoring tools for applications and the under-lying infrastructure maintaining system health and provide timely feedback on performance and potential risks to service availability.
• Leverage deep expertise in Microsoft Azure’s IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings to guide, design and implement, and enhance Azure manage cloud-based solutions that align with business and technical needs.
• Comprehensive understanding of building and maintaining automated CI/CD pipelines, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, Terraform to provision and manage Azure cloud resources and to ensure consistent, secure, and reproducible deployments.
• Broad understanding of API gateways using Azure API Management (APIM), maintaining Azure B2C user flows and UI/UX modifications and policy configurations, to guide team workloads.
• Thorough understanding of designing, implementing, and managing SQL databases within Azure for business-critical applications, enabling optimum operational efficiency.
• Provide training and support and mentorship to team members to ensure adoption of best practices within Platform Engineering.
• Ensure clear and detailed documentation for deployment processes, architecture designs and troubleshooting guidelines are completed.
• Effectively communicate progress, challenges, and solutions with team members, stakeholders, and management.
• Complete regular and consistent management reporting for the Platform Engineering team, highlighting objectives, velocity, progress, concerns and trend analysis.

You may be required to undertake other duties assigned by your line manager as appropriate

Requirements

We are looking for someone with the following

• Extensive experience of leading and mentoring technical teams in an Azure Engineering or Technical Manager/Lead role with a full understanding of Identity, Integration and DevOps practices.

• Experience in providing high-quality break-fix support in a fast-paced environment.
• Proven ability to monitor and maintain complex cloud-based systems, ensuring uptime and performance.
• Management of Azure subscriptions and Azure resources.
• Supervising the use of infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates or Terraform to provision and manage Azure cloud resources.
• Implementing automation into current processes and procedures.
• Oversight of managing customer identity and access using Azure AD B2C.
• Experience of custom policies and user flows in Azure B2C.
• Familiarity with creating and building integration patterns.
• Using log analytics to identify real-time identity analytics.
• Knowledge of identity and access protocols such as OpenID, OAuth2.0 & SAML2.0.
• Familiarity with APIM, including security and cloud-to-cloud integration.
• Understanding of C# programming, Azure Functions and Web Apps.
• Experience of working within a .NET environment.
• Understanding of designing, implementing, and managing SQL databases within an Azure environment.
• Applying best practices for compliance with frameworks like the Azure Security Benchmark, NIST, and NCSC.
• Implementation of security testing tools such as SonarQube and Zed Attack Proxy.
• Fostering strong relationships with cross-functional teams and stakeholders, alongside managing stakeholder expectations.
• Communicating progress, challenges, and solutions with team members, stakeholders, and management, including preparation of management reports.
• Supporting senior management to create and manage engineering roadmaps and priorities.
• Providing mentoring, training and support to team members to ensure the adoption of best practices in Azure coding practices.

Benefits

As an LI employee, you will be entitled to our company benefits which include

• A fully remote and flexible working set up
• 33 days annual leave, inclusive of Bank Holidays
• 4 x annual salary Life Assurance
• Market leading pension scheme through Legal & General
• Enhanced Family Friendly Policies
• Excellent learning, training, and career development opportunities
• 24/7 access to our Employee Assistance Programme
• A diverse and inclusive culture where everyone is respected and valued

Application and Interview Process

To apply for this role, you will need to submit a CV and answer some pre-screening questions.

The interview and assessment process for this role will involve a telephone interview with our Talent Team, followed by a first stage and a final stage interview. Interviews will be conducted either remotely via MS Teams or face to face.

If we need to make a reasonable adjustment so that you can complete your application, please contact us as soon as possible by emailing talent@livestockinformation.org.uk before the closing date to discuss your needs.

The closing date for this role is 4pm on Friday 30th May . Applications received after the closing date will not be considered. Please note that we may close the advert early if we receive a high volume of applications

Values

We approach our work with TACT; we are Transparent, Accountable, Committed and we work as a Team.

We are transparent together, embracing honesty and building trust. We are accountable to the industry and strive for the best possible solutions for the communities we serve. We drive change with passion, commitment and enthusiasm to deliver a great service to the livestock industry. We work kindly and cohesively which allows us to support each other in our personal and strategic goals.

Diversity statement

At Livestock Information, we value diversity and believe that every individual brings different strengths. We understand that not everyone may possess every single skill outlined in this job description, but if you believe you have a solid skill set that enables you to excel in this position then we really encourage you to apply.

Further information

If you feel your application has not been treated in a fair and open manner or if you are dis-satisfied with any of your interactions during the recruitment process and you wish to make a complaint, you should contact our Talent team via email: talent@livestockinformation.org.uk

Disclaimer 

Livestock Information Ltd. cannot sponsor work visas at this time.

Livestock Information Ltd. Does not discriminate based on race, sex, colour, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other reason prohibited by law in provision of employment opportunities and benefits.

 Livestock Information Ltd. Does not accept unsolicited CVs from any source other than directly from a candidate. Any unsolicited CV’s not originating directly from a candidate and sent to Livestock Information Ltd or any Livestock Information Ltd employees, including unsolicited CVs sent to a Livestock Information Ltd mailing address or email address, are rejected. Livestock Information Ltd will NOT pay a fee for any placement resulting from the receipt of an unsolicited CV. Livestock Information Ltd considers any candidate for whom the recruiter has submitted an unsolicited CV referred by the company free of any fees.