Principal Devops Engineer

We are looking for a Sr. Principal Devops Engineer. This is an onsite, full-time permanent hire position in Raleigh, North Carolina with our client. No visa sponsorship is available at this time or in the future for this position. In this role as a Senior Azure DevOps Engineer, you will own the design and direction of our Infrastructure as Code, Azure CI/CD pipelines and serves as the primary technical bridge between the DevOps and application development teams. As a Principal Azure DevOps Engineer, you are expected to operate with significant autonomy, make architectural decisions that affect multiple teams, and elevate the work of the engineers around them. Responsibilities as a Principal Azure DevOps Engineer: Architect Azure DevOps YAML pipelines and reusable pipeline templates across the organization Lead the design, refactoring, and governance of our Bicep module library Establish module boundaries, parameter conventions, target-scope strategy, and versioning approach across subscriptions and environments Serve as the embedded technical partner for application development teams. Sit in design reviews, translate platform constraints into developer-friendly patterns, and translate developer needs into platform capabilities Drive measurable improvements in deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (DORA metrics) Build the instrumentation needed to prove it Partner closely with the Security team on Azure Policy and Defender posture Eliminate operational toil through self-service tooling Mentor DevOps I and II engineers and developers learning IaC. Review PRs as a teaching opportunity, not a gate. Write the ADRs, runbooks, and onboarding docs Lead post-incident reviews focused on systemic fixes. Participate in platform on-call rotation Required Skills and Qualifications as a Principal Azure DevOps Engineer: 8+ years in DevOps, SRE, Platform, or Cloud Engineering, with at least 4 years focused on Azure at enterprise scale (multi-subscription, multi-environment) Deep, demonstrable expertise authoring Azure DevOps YAML pipelines — multi-stage pipelines, reusable templates, parameterized template libraries, deployment jobs, environments, approvals, and variable group strategy Production-grade Bicep authorship: modular design, parameter and output discipline, conditional deployments, all target scopes (resourceGroup, subscription, managementGroup, tenant), and integration with deployment stacks or ARM what-if workflows Strong PowerShell scripting for automation, remediation, and tooling. Comfortable with Az PowerShell modules and Microsoft Graph PowerShell Solid command of Git workflows and a clear point of view on branching, PR review, and release strategy at scale Working expertise across Azure core services: Entra ID, Key Vault, Storage, App Service, Functions, AKS or Container Apps, Application Gateway, Front Door, Log Analytics, and Azure Monitor Proven ability to work directly with application developers as a technical peer Experience setting standards and getting them adopted without formal authority — through code, documentation, and conversation Nice to Have Microsoft certifications: AZ-400 (DevOps Engineer Expert), AZ-305 (Solutions Architect Expert), AZ-104