The Role We Want You ForCloud Engineering owns the day-to-day operation, evolution, and reliability of our cloud estate. The majority runs in Azure (application gateways, App Service Environments, storage, contains, Functions, VMs, and Azure SQL), with traditional lift-and-shift constructs still doing real work alongside more modern patterns. AWS is a meaningful and growing part of the picture too. This is the team that keeps that environment running well: provisioning, optimizing, troubleshooting, securing, and moving workloads onto code-defined patterns. This role brings modern IaC, automation, and engineering discipline to the cloud estate directly, and helps raise the bar on what "production-ready" looks like here. his is an AI-forward position. Senior leadership is all-in on AI, and we want someone who genuinely uses it every day for code, troubleshooting, documentation, and reasoning. Not as a buzzword. As a daily multiplier.
The Specifics of the Role- Everything you build and operate has one measure: is the cloud estate more reliable, more secure, more cost-efficient, and more transparent than it was yesterday?
- Design, provision, and operate the services that run our environment. Most of this is Azure today: App Service and ASE, Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance, Azure Functions, VMs and VM Scale Sets, and container workloads on AKS, ACI, and ACR. The same patterns apply to AWS workloads where they run there.
- Own application-layer traffic for the workloads you run (Application Gateway, Load Balancer, Front Door, Traffic Manager in Azure today; AWS equivalents follow the same patterns), partnering with Network Engineering on the underlying connectivity.
- Operate, troubleshoot, and tune workloads for performance, capacity, cost, and security posture. When something is wrong, you're the one who finds it and fixes it.
- Drive disciplined improvement of existing lift-and-shift workloads: PaaS-ification where it makes sense, right-sizing, decommissioning, and modernization that keeps things running while making them better.
- Ship infrastructure with Terraform as the primary tool. Use existing modules where they exist, build new ones where they don't, and establish patterns that scale as the estate grows.
- Use Ansible for configuration management and Packer for image baking; treat golden images, hardened baselines, and post-provision configuration as code, not one-off changes.
- Apply the same discipline to AWS, using CloudFormation and Terraform with consistent cross-cloud patterns.
- No click-ops as the durable answer. If you made a change in the portal to fix something today, the follow-up is to encode it in IaC tomorrow.
- Use AI tooling (GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, agent frameworks) every day for code, IaC, troubleshooting, log analysis, and documentation. You should be visibly faster because of it.
- Build AI-assisted automation into operational work: incident triage, runbook execution, drift detection, change summarization, cost analysis. Look for toil and remove it.
- Explore agentic patterns (workflow engines, autonomous tasks, intelligent automation) and bring operational reality to those experiments.
- Implement and enforce security guardrails: Defender for Cloud findings, Key Vault hygiene, identity and access patterns (Entra ID, managed identities, RBAC), policy as code, secret handling, and network segmentation.
- Build observability into everything you ship: dashboards, monitors, and SLOs defined as code, with alerts that tell on-call what's actually wrong at 2 AM. Strong experience with any modern observability platform translates.
- Treat cost as a first-class engineering concern. Tag discipline, reservations, scaling policies, and steady right-sizing, not heroic quarterly cleanups.
- Contribute to disaster recovery and business continuity patterns (backups, failover, recovery testing) built into the infrastructure rather than bolted on.
Requirements- Deep, hands-on Azure experience (5+ years) across the services listed above: App Service/ASE, Storage, AKS/containers, Functions, VMs, Azure SQL, and app-layer traffic. You've built it, broken it, fixed it, and operated it.
- Working knowledge of Azure networking (VNets, NSGs, Private Endpoints, hybrid connectivity, DNS), sufficient to design well-formed workloads and collaborate effectively with Network Engineering.
- Terraform fluency: modules, state, workspaces, and real production usage.
- Scripting and automation: clean PowerShell, Python, or Bash to automate work and eliminate toil.
- Familiarity with AWS. Productive with EC2, VPC, S3, RDS, Lambda, and IAM, with consistent cross-cloud patterns. CloudFormation experience is a plus.
- AI-forward mindset: actively using AI tools (Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude) as daily multipliers, with a real perspective on where they add leverage and where they don't.
- Strong bias to action: you ship the change, iterate, learn through the work instead of waiting for the perfect spec.
- Cloud-first modernization experience: you have taken existing lift-and-shift workloads and rearchitected them toward PaaS, containers, serverless, and managed services where it makes sense.
- AKS/EKS/Kubernetes operations.
- Modern observability tooling: Datadog in particular (dashboards, monitors, SLOs, APM, log management, all defined as code). Comparable experience with Grafana/Prometheus, New Relic, or Honeycomb transfers well.
- Azure DevOps and/or GitHub Actions for delivery pipelines.
- FinOps experience: cost visibility, chargeback, optimization at portfolio scale.
- Security and policy tooling: Defender for Cloud, Azure Policy, tfsec/checkov/Trivy.
- Workflow automation platforms (e.g. n8n) or interest in agent-style automation.
- Relevant Azure certifications (AZ-104, AZ-305, AZ-400) are useful, but not required.
Some Things You Should Know- This position will service our clients regionally.
- Our clients and projects are nationwide - Travel will be required.
- No other builder can offer the collaborative design-build approach that Clayco does.
- We work on creative, complex, award-winning, high-profile jobs.
- The pace is fast!
- This position is classified as a safety-sensitive role in accordance with applicable state and federal laws. Candidates selected for this position will be subject to a comprehensive background check, which includes mandatory drug testing.
Benefits- Discretionary Annual Bonus: Subject to company and individual performance.
- Comprehensive Benefits Package Including: Medical, dental and vision plans, 401k, generous PTO and paid company holidays, employee assistance program, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability coverage, learning & development programs and more!
Compensation- The salary range for this position considers a wide range of factors in making compensation decisions including but not limited to: Education, qualifications, skills, training, experience, certifications, internal equity, and location. Compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.
