What this role is actually about
We're hiring a Cloud Support Engineer Lead to own the reliability, observability, and operational health of business-critical applications running on Microsoft Azure. This is a hands-on leadership role - you won't be managing from a distance. You'll be in the work alongside your team, diagnosing hard problems, making judgment calls under pressure, and building the processes and standards that keep complex systems running well.
The environment is real and the stakes are real. You'll be working across APIs, distributed services, and cloud infrastructure that directly supports airline operations. When something breaks, people notice. That means we need someone who stays clear-headed when things get complicated, communicates honestly when they don't have the answer yet, and treats every incident as an opportunity to understand the system better.
You'll lead a support team while remaining a credible technical resource yourself. You'll partner closely with QA, development, architecture, and business stakeholders - which means you'll need to be as comfortable explaining a problem to a non-technical audience as you are diagnosing it in Azure Monitor. And you'll help define what good looks like for this team, not just maintain the status quo.
What you will do
- Lead the design and implementation of monitoring strategies - metrics, dashboards, and proactive alerting - across application and API health
- Analyze system behavior, observability data, and transaction flows to diagnose issues across complex, interconnected business processes
- Lead incident response: timely resolution, honest root cause analysis, and genuine continuous improvement - not just closing tickets
- Provide technical oversight and validation during deployments across development and production environments
- Coordinate daily activities of the support team including prioritization, assignment, and development of the people on it
- Establish and improve support processes, documentation standards, and operational procedures that will outlast any single incident
- Report on API performance, incident trends, and system health to both engineering and business stakeholders in language each audience can use
- Build and maintain deep domain knowledge of the applications, APIs, and Azure architecture you're supporting
- Collaborate across internal and external teams to resolve issues and close the gap between support and engineering
The kind of person who does well here
Technical skills matter and we'll get to those. But the people who thrive at H&K share some things that don't show up on a resume.
They're honest before they're impressive. When they don't know something, they say so and go find out. When something went wrong on their watch, they own it and explain what they learned. They're not trying to manage perception - they're trying to solve the problem.
They're curious about the parts they don't know yet. This environment spans cloud infrastructure, APIs, distributed systems, airline operations, and organizational complexity all at once. Nobody walks in knowing all of it. The people who grow fastest here are the ones who find that interesting rather than overwhelming.
They're comfortable moving before the picture is complete. We build solutions that work now and evolve over time. That means making good decisions with incomplete information, adjusting course without losing momentum, and being energized by change rather than threatened by it.
They make the people around them better. This is a team sport. We're looking for someone whose instinct when they figure something out is to share it - who leads the support team not just by knowing more but by helping others know more too.
They care about the work, not just the output. There's a difference between closing a ticket and actually fixing a problem. We want someone who knows the difference and consistently chooses the harder, more honest path.
Required qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Management Information Systems, or a related field with an emphasis in systems analysis, plus 5+ years in cloud infrastructure support - OR 7+ years of equivalent experience combining education, training, and hands-on work.
Technical experience:
- Azure infrastructure
- Azure DevOps
- Automation and scripting
- Application Performance Management (APM)
- REST / SOAP APIs
- API testing tools
- Agile methodologies
- Git
Preferred qualifications
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals, Azure Administrator Associate, or Azure Developer Associate
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure API Management
- Microsoft Power BI
- Relational databases (Oracle, SQL) and/or NoSQL (CosmosDB)
- Messaging technologies (Azure Service Bus)
- .NET, C#, Java
- TIBCO BusinessWorks
- Postman
- Dynatrace APM including DQL
- Azure Application Insights including KQL
Schedule and on-call
This role is part of a support organization providing 24x7x365 coverage through a shared on-call rotation. That includes scheduled after-hours and weekend support, backed by automation and proactive alerting to keep the workload sustainable. We're transparent about this upfront because it matters and because the right person for this role will understand why it's part of doing the job well.
Location
This role is based in Houston and works on a hybrid schedule. You'll be onsite near the Galleria at least two days a week, with additional onsite days as the work requires - including a monthly team meeting that typically brings the full team together for a third day. We're not counting days for the sake of it, but presence matters here and we're transparent about that upfront.
