Protective Life Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:
Protective Life is dedicated to helping protect their customers against life's uncertainties, and they are seeking a Lead Cloud Architect to join their cloud infrastructure team. In this role, you will architect and engineer resilient Azure environments, collaborate with various teams to enhance cloud services, and drive site reliability engineering practices to support the organization's cloud transformation.
Responsibilities:
• Architect the Cloud Foundation: Partner with peers to refine Azure Landing Zone architectures, weaving in Networking, Security, and Enterprise Architecture needs into our secure platform. Evolve the 'Secure Sandbox' for better multi-tenant isolation, compliance, and growth, including networking, monitoring, and automation. Offer senior architecture guidance for onboarding new cloud workloads.
• Build 'Paved Roads' for Cloud Enablement: Collaborate to enhance reusable IaC modules (Bicep, ARM, Terraform) and CI/CD templates (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions). Empower app and domain teams with refined governance, security, and cost controls. Orchestrate automated builds for O365 and cloud platforms company-wide, upholding standards via Azure Policy.
• Drive Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Practices: Team with Operations to define SLOs/SLIs, using tools like Azure Monitor and Application Insights for advanced self-healing, remediation, and strategies (e.g., blue/green, canary). Support production with issue troubleshooting, 24/7 on-call rotation, and resolution of critical cloud incidents.
• Standardize Advanced Platforms: Optimize AKS and related services with peers, focusing on provisioning, scaling, observability, and security in hybrid/multi-cloud setups, including containers and Blob Storage. Shape the design, roadmap, and support for Azure and O365 applications.
• Foster Platform Resilience and Scalability: Engage in reviews, tuning, chaos engineering, incident response, and post-mortems to mitigate risks and boost metrics. Integrate security via Azure Defender, Sentinel, and Key Vault into DevOps. Lead disaster recovery planning and multi-site/multi-vendor operations. Apply proactive problem-solving to preempt issues and inform strategic decisions.
• Contribute to Team Excellence: Exchange knowledge via code reviews, troubleshooting, and sessions to mature practices. Join Agile sprints, standups, blameless post-mortems, and tech radars. Grasp development basics to build/update code for cloud maturity (e.g., Terraform, JSON, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible).
• Advance DevOps and Automation: Champion CI/CD and release strategies organization-wide. Research and deploy streamlined automations; craft PowerShell/VM scripts for ops support. Integrate monitoring/config services, self-developing as needed. Engage seniors and stakeholders to promote cloud best practices.
• Innovate with Identity and Emerging Tech: Apply on-prem/cloud IAM expertise for Entra ID, Federation, and Azure B2C. Explore services like Azure Arc or Confidential Computing for PoCs; analyze trends in reporting and forensics for regulated compliance.
Qualifications:
Required:
• 8+ years in cloud engineering (5+ in Azure architecture/SRE); hands-on in production-scale environments, high-availability, and root-cause analysis.
• Background in Cloud Development and Architecture; experience managing projects of varying scale.
• Proficient in Azure essentials: Landing Zones, AKS, VMs, Container Instances, Blob Storage, VNet, Entra ID, Policy/Blueprints.
• Design/manage IaaS/PaaS/SaaS (Load Balancers, App Gateways, DNS, Front Door, Storage, Monitor, Security Center, Log Analytics).
• IaC/CI/CD mastery (Bicep/ARM/Terraform, Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions, PowerShell/CLI); 2+ years in automation for CI/CD.
• SRE core: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, observability (Azure Monitor/Prometheus/Grafana), automation (Logic Apps/Functions).
• Security: Defender, Sentinel, Key Vault; IAM depth (Entra ID, AD, Azure AD DS/Connect/B2C, MFA).
• Enterprise account/security models; Azure Policy implementation; Key Vault/encryption.
• 2+ years O365 and Azure AD B2C; 2+ years Kubernetes/Docker/Containers; 3+ years Azure (Functions, API Mgmt, Blobs, VMs, SQL, Event Grid), Microservices, .NET Core, PowerApps.
• Large-scale distributed systems, OSes, secure configs; deep Azure/cloud knowledge.
• Complex system problem-solving; container/microservices; requirements-to-architecture translation.
• Collaborative communicator for partnerships/influence; agile/blameless culture; change/incident management.
• Mentor juniors; plan/manage technical implementations.
Preferred:
• Certifications: AZ-305, AZ-500, AZ-400, CKAD/CKA; AZ-300 A plus.
• Industry certs encouraged.
• Advanced Azure: Arc, AI/ML (e.g., ML on AKS), databases (Cosmos/SQL).
• Compute/Storage/Networking automation (Azure Automation/CLI/PowerShell).
• Chaos tools (Gremlin/Litmus), GitOps (Flux/ArgoCD), Ansible; regulated envs (HIPAA/GDPR/SOX).
• Open-source/internal tooling contributions.
• Bachelor's in CS/Engineering (or equivalent) strongly preferred.
Company:
Protective is a holding company, whose subsidiaries provide financial services Founded in 1907, the company is headquartered in Birmingham, USA, with a team of 1001-5000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.