Azure Lead Technical Architect

Role Overview

HSO is seeking an experienced technical leader to shape and evolve its Monitoring & Observability service across Dynamics 365, Power Platform, AI agents, Azure, and hybrid environments. Working closely with the Service Owner and monitoring development team, this role will set technical direction, translate strategy into scalable service design, and improve onboarding, automation, reliability, and cost efficiency.

The role combines architecture, platform strategy, operational improvement, technical mentoring, and clear communication. A key priority is building a differentiated observability offering for Microsoft business applications, not only infrastructure monitoring.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with the Service Owner to define the technical strategy and roadmap, including priorities, risks, dependencies, investment options, and practical recommendations.
• Act as the senior technical authority for the service, setting architecture, engineering, observability, alerting, dashboard, telemetry, and service-health standards.
• Lead the evolution of monitoring capabilities across Dynamics 365, Power Platform, AI agents (Copilot Studio + Microsoft Foundry, Azure Monitor, and hybrid environments, with business applications as the primary focus.
• Improve how the service is developed, onboarded, changed, and operated by removing bottlenecks, manual effort, and unnecessary dependencies.
• Drive automation, reusable components, standardized patterns, infrastructure as code, self-service, self-healing, and efficient DevOps practices.
• Identify service cost drivers with the Service Owner and prioritize improvements that increase scalability and reduce cost without compromising quality, security, reliability, or client outcomes.
• Assess Microsoft and third-party technologies based on client value, implementation effort, operational impact, and total cost of ownership.
• Partner with domain specialists to turn critical processes, failure modes, meaningful signals, and client impacts into monitoring and observability service designs.
• Provide technical leadership, mentoring, architecture review, training and escalation guidance, while partnering with engineering and service delivery rather than acting as the primary responder.
• Engage clients and internal stakeholders, translating technical options, constraints, and service insights into clear business impact and roadmap recommendations.

Expected Outcomes

• Faster, more predictable customer onboarding and implementation of changes.
• Lower manual effort and delivery cost through automation, standardization, reuse, and improved engineering practices.
• A scalable, maintainable, and market-leading observability offering for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, AI agents, and the wider Microsoft platform.
• A prioritized, evidence-based roadmap supported by measures for lead time, effort, automation, efficiency, service cost, reliability, and client value.
• Clear, business-focused service insights that help clients and service teams understand risk and prioritize improvements.

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong Azure architecture and engineering experience across enterprise-scale Azure and hybrid environments, including networking, security, governance, resilience, and operations.
• Hands-on experience with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, Managed Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Experience designing and operating enterprise monitoring and observability solutions, including APM, distributed telemetry, service health, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis.
• Automation experience using PowerShell, Azure Automation, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, infrastructure as code, or comparable technologies.
• Experience with Github Copilot and AI augmented delivery.
• Technical leadership in a managed services or similarly complex environment, including standards, reference architectures, operational patterns, and ITIL-based processes.
• Demonstrated success improving onboarding, implementation, development, deployment, maintainability, operational efficiency, and cost through automation and standardization.
• Experience evaluating tools and technologies against business value, delivery effort, operational impact, and total cost of ownership.
• Experience designing observability for business applications or SaaS platforms, ideally Dynamics 365, Power Platform, or a comparable enterprise application estate.
• Ability to work across unfamiliar domains, draw out critical processes and failure modes from specialists, and convert them into coherent service designs.

Communication & Leadership

• Explains complex technical concepts, options, risks, and trade-offs in clear, outcome-focused language for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Advises and constructively challenges stakeholders while building alignment and shared ownership of decisions.
• Influences effectively across engineering, service delivery, leadership, sales, and client teams.
• Demonstrates sound judgement, active listening, collaborative problem-solving, ownership, and transparent follow-through.
• Mentors technical teams and leads improvement discussions without undermining others’ expertise or ownership.

Desirable Experience

• Dynamics 365, Power Platform, or Microsoft Fabric
• SRE practices including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and reliability engineering
• Microsoft Sentinel, SIEM, integrations, APIs, GitHub Enterprise, or modern DevOps
• Agentic AI, Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio, or AI-led operations
• Third-party platforms such as Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, LogicMonitor, or SolarWinds
• Client-facing service design, consulting, presales, or roadmap discussions

Preferred Certifications

• Microsoft Certified:
  • Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104)
  • Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305)
  • DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400)
• ITIL Foundation or higher