Azure DevOps Architect | Remote | Independent Candidates

Role: Azure DevOps Architect Location: Durham, NC (Remote) Duration: 12 Months contract Visas: Independent Candidates Mandatory Skills: - Azure Deployment Stacks — Enterprise-scale infrastructure lifecycle governance across hundreds of Azure subscriptions, including resource management, scoping, and deny assignment enforcement. - Open Policy Agent (OPA) / Policy-as-Code — Design and enforcement of security and compliance policies embedded natively across CI/CD pipelines at enterprise scale (500+ engineering teams). - Sigstore — Production-level implementation of artifact signing, verification, and software supply chain integrity pipelines across distributed engineering environments - Azure Chaos Studio — Resilience engineering through controlled fault injection and distributed system failure experimentation across microservices and cloud-native workloads - Azure Confidential Computing — Architecture and deployment of secure enclave workloads for high-security, regulated enterprise environments - SBOM Automation Pipelines — End-to-end automated Software Bill of Materials generation, dependency visibility, and vulnerability tracking integrated into CI/CD workflows - FluxCD GitOps Platform Engineering — Enterprise-grade GitOps-driven infrastructure delivery and cluster management for large-scale AKS environments Required Experience: - 10+ years of experience in DevOps architecture and cloud platform engineering. - Demonstrated enterprise-scale delivery across Fortune-level organizations in finance, healthcare, retail, or technology - Proven hands-on experience with all seven mandatory niche skills listed above — generalist profiles will not be considered - Experience supporting 500+ engineering teams or equivalent large-scale platform environments - Background in regulated industries with strong understanding of compliance, audit, and security requirements - Azure DevOps — Enterprise CI/CD platform design and management - Kubernetes (AKS) — Large-scale cluster platform engineering - Infrastructure as Code — Terraform and/or Bicep at enterprise scale - DevSecOps Architecture — Security-first pipeline design and governance - Secure Artifact Signing Pipelines — Integration with modern supply chain security frameworks Note Key Responsibilities: - Architect and govern centralized CI/CD platforms supporting large engineering organizations using Azure DevOps integrated with OPA policy-as-code enforcement - Design and implement enterprise infrastructure lifecycle management using Azure Deployment Stacks across multi-subscription Azure environments - Build and operate GitOps delivery frameworks using FluxCD for large-scale AKS cluster management - Lead software supply chain security initiatives including Sigstore artifact signing and automated SBOM generation pipelines - Architect secure workload environments leveraging Azure Confidential Computing for regulated and high-security use cases - Conduct resilience engineering experiments across distributed microservices using Azure Chaos Studio - Define and enforce DevSecOps standards, governance frameworks, and security controls across engineering teams - Collaborate with security, platform, and product engineering teams to align DevOps strategy with enterprise compliance and regulatory requirements - Mentor senior engineers and establish best practices for GitOps, supply chain security, and policy-driven delivery All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.