Port Elizabeth: Cloud and Identity Manager posted by Top Vitae

MAIN PURPOSE OF THE JOB:
The Manager, Cloud & Identity is responsible for the delivery, optimization, and governance of the organizations Azure cloud platforms, with a strong emphasis on cost management (FinOps), automation, and scalable cloud operations. This role leads the evolution of Azure as a self-service, secure, and cost-efficient platform, enabling application teams to rapidly consume cloud resources while maintaining enterprise controls. Identity services across Active Directory, Entra ID, and Silverfort serve as foundational capabilities that enable secure cloud access, automation, and Zero Trust enforcement.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS & RESPONSIBILITES:

Azure Cloud Platform Management (Primary Focus)

• Own day-to-day operations and strategic improvement of enterprise Azure environments, ensuring reliability, scalability, security, and performance.
• Lead Azure platform architecture, including landing zones, networking, shared services, and management group design.
• Establish and enforce Azure governance standards, including RBAC, Azure Policy, tagging, naming conventions, and security baselines.
• Partner with application, infrastructure, and architecture teams to enable cloud migrations, refactoring, and modernization initiatives.
• Serve as the primary escalation point for Azure platform incidents, driving root cause analysis and preventive improvements.

Cloud Financial Management (FinOps)

• Lead Azure FinOps practices, ensuring cloud spend transparency, accountability, and optimization.
• Define and enforce cost allocation models, tagging standards, and chargeback/showback mechanisms.
• Monitor Azure consumption and spend, proactively identifying opportunities for:
  • Rightsizing
  • Reserved Instances / Savings Plans
  • Storage and data lifecycle optimization
  • Idle and orphaned resource cleanup
• Partner with finance and business stakeholders to forecast cloud costs and align budgets to business demand.
• Produce regular cloud cost and optimization reports for leadership.

Cloud Automation & Self-Service Enablement

• Drive automation-first cloud operations, reducing manual effort and increasing deployment consistency.
• Lead development of standardized, reusable Azure blueprints/modules using:
  • Bicep / ARM templates
  • PowerShell
  • Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
• Enable self-service resource provisioning for application teams through approved templates and pipelines.
• Establish guardrails to ensure self-service deployments remain secure, compliant, and cost-controlled.
• Promote Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps practices across cloud teams.

Platform Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Define and manage cloud operational KPIs, including availability, performance, cost efficiency, and deployment success rates.
• Implement proactive monitoring, alerting, and health dashboards using Azure-native tools.
• Lead continuous improvement initiatives focused on:
  • Reducing incidents
  • Improving mean time to resolution (MTTR)
  • Increasing automation coverage
• Ensure backup, disaster recovery, and resiliency patterns are implemented and tested across Azure workloads.
• Maintain platform documentation, runbooks, and operational standards.

Identity & Access Management (Supporting Focus)

• Oversee enterprise identity services across Active Directory, Entra ID, and hybrid identity.
• Ensure stable operation of Conditional Access, MFA, directory synchronization, and identity lifecycle processes.
• Support Silverfort-based identity protection, adaptive authentication, and access control enforcement.
• Ensure identity services align with cloud automation, RBAC, and Zero Trust architecture.
• Partner with cybersecurity teams on identity risk management and response.

M&A Cloud & Identity Integration

• Support cloud and identity onboarding during mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures.
• Participate in discovery and assessment of acquired Azure environments, AD forests, and identity posture.
• Execute standardized onboarding into enterprise Azure landing zones and identity services.
• Apply established integration playbooks to ensure secure, consistent cloud adoption.

People & Vendor Management

• Lead, mentor, and develop a global team of cloud and identity engineers.
• Define priorities, manage capacity, and ensure predictable delivery.
• Manage vendor relationships, licensing, and renewals related to Azure and identity platforms.
• Collaborate closely with cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, and application teams.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS:

• Bachelors degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or related field.
• 810+ years of experience in Azure cloud engineering or platform operations.
• 3+ years in a people management or technical leadership role.
• Strong expertise in Azure services, governance, and platform design.
• Proven experience implementing FinOps practices in Azure.
• Experience building automation and self-service cloud platforms.
• Solid knowledge of Active Directory, Entra ID, Conditional Access, and MFA.
• Familiarity with Silverfort or similar identity security platforms.
• Strong automation skills using PowerShell, Bicep/ARM, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS:

• Microsoft Azure certifications (AZ-104, AZ-305, SC-300).
• Experience with Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
• Experience with Terraform in Azure environments.
• Exposure to AWS or GCP (secondary).
• Experience supporting cloud platforms in M&A scenarios.

Please consider your application unsuccessful should you not receive feedback with in 2 weeks of applying.