Lead Cloud Operations Engineer- Azure

Zafin is an AI platform company helping regulated institutions modernize how critical work is designed, governed, and delivered. Our technology enables organizations to move faster while maintaining the governance, accountability, and control required in highly regulated environments. Our portfolio includes Zafin AIOS , an agent orchestration platform for governed AI work; the Zafin Banking Platform , which helps banks modernize product, pricing, offers, billing, loyalty, and relationship management; and Zafin IO , an integration platform that connects data, systems, and workflows across complex enterprise environments. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Zafin partners with leading financial institutions across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. As AI transforms the future of financial services, we're building the platforms that help regulated organizations adopt AI responsibly and at scale. What’s the Opportunity? Reporting to the Senior Manager, Cloud Operations, the Lead Cloud Operations Engineer is a senior-level technical role responsible for leading a team of cloud engineers and hands-on technical execution in Azure/Kubernetes environments. You will be building scalable, reliable, and efficient infrastructure while mentoring junior engineers, maintaining best practices, and ensuring optimal performance, security, and cost-effectiveness in a customer-facing role. This is a technical leadership position for someone who wants to stay close to infrastructure while growing a team. You will roll up your sleeves daily, pair with engineers on complex problems, and drive automation initiatives that reduce toil and improve platform reliability. What You Will Do Lead technical strategy and best practices for Azure cloud operations and AKS deployments Design, implement, and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and Azure DevOps Manage Kubernetes deployments with ArgoCD, Helm, and GitOps patterns for auditability and compliance Architect and manage Azure Application Gateway, load balancing, WAF, and ingress strategies Oversee secrets and certificate management using Azure Key Vault and implement security best practices Build and maintain Azure Container Registry (ACR) pipelines and image scanning workflows Mentor and guide junior engineers on technical tasks, code reviews, and cloud architecture decisions Build automation solutions to reduce manual toil and improve operational efficiency Manage and troubleshoot AKS clusters, networking, storage, and identity/access control Own incident response, RCA documentation, and presentation to stakeholders Monitor infrastructure health, performance, and security posture; identify and resolve bottlenecks Work with peers to establish and enforce infrastructure standards and compliance controls across client environments Communicate proactively with customers and internal teams on infrastructure health and roadmap Maintain security, backup, disaster recovery, and high-availability strategies Drive cost optimization and FinOps practices across cloud infrastructure Support offshore hours and multiple time zones as needed What You Need to Succeed Must Haves 8–12 years of cloud/infrastructure engineering experience 5+ years of hands-on Azure cloud platform experience (VMs, networking, identity, monitoring) 5+ years with Kubernetes, specifically Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) production experience Expert-level Terraform and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices Strong Azure DevOps or equivalent CI/CD platform experience Hands-on experience with ArgoCD or GitOps deployment patterns for Kubernetes Proficiency with Helm for Kubernetes package management and templating Azure Application Gateway configuration and management (load balancing, WAF, SSL termination) Azure Key Vault and secrets management implementation and best practices Azure Container Registry (ACR) operations, image scanning, and registry maintenance Proficiency in Linux administration and troublesh…