Azure Infrastructure Support Engineer

About the role
You will be the single point of ownership for a production Azure estate of approximately 42 Windows Server VMs across 7 environments (Production, Performance, Production-Support, two Development and two staging environments) plus an Azure Load Balancer, running an enterprise product-information-management (PIM) platform. The scope is infrastructure only, defined by a 15-point support checklist agreed with the client: monitoring, troubleshooting, patching, backups, certificates, SFTP services and monthly reporting. Application-level and database-level work is handled by separate teams - your job is to run the platform underneath them and coordinate cleanly at the boundary.
Responsibilities - Daily
· Monitor the Zabbix dashboard throughout UK business hours and own every alert (CPU, memory, disk space, service stopped, TCP port down): log in to the server, diagnose using top processes and event logs, remediate, and notify the application team by email.
· Run the daily checks: all servers up, VPN / network gateway connected, previous night's backup jobs successful - rerun any failed job.
Responsibilities - Ongoing / on request
· Server troubleshooting: restart stuck Windows services and IIS application pools, recover disk space (clear temp/cache files, archive event logs older than 30 days), reboot and fix VMs at OS level.
· Service requests: create/remove SFTP virtual accounts (Bitvise SSH Server), whitelist IPs in Azure NSGs after approval, start/stop/resize VMs, restore files from Azure Backup.
· Log every incident and request as a ticket or an email record.
Responsibilities - Weekly
· Verify weekly backup jobs completed successfully.
Responsibilities - Monthly
· Produce three reports in the agreed formats: (a) production server utilization with CPU/memory graphs from Zabbix, (b) disk space and SSL certificate validity for all servers, (c) availability report covering antivirus, patching and backup status.
· Housekeeping: Azure VM health review, backup job review, cleanup of old snapshots, review of NSG/firewall rule changes.
· Run a 30-minute service review call with stakeholders: last month's issues, servers running hot (low disk / high CPU or memory), pending actions.
Responsibilities - Quarterly
· Own Windows patching end-to-end for all environments: propose dates 20 days ahead, obtain approvals and the change request, take snapshots/backups, patch Dev/Test first and then Production, coordinate the application team's sanity check, delete snapshots after the 7-day confirmation window.
· Verify antivirus (Microsoft Defender) definitions are current on all servers; review pending OS updates.
Responsibilities - As they fall due
· Track and execute renewals: wildcard SSL certificate installation and re-binding on all IIS servers (next expiry Feb-2027) and Bitvise SFTP license renewals (procurement cost sits with the client; the execution sits with you).
· Keep the environment runbook current: server list, IPs, licenses, credential locations, contact/escalation list.
· Escalate anything application-side (PIM errors, data issues, deployments, database-level problems) to the application team / product servicedesk - coordinate, do not fix.
Required skills and experience
· 6-10 years of Windows Server administration (2016/2019/2022): services, event logs, disk management, performance triage.
· 2-3 years hands-on Azure IaaS: VMs, managed disks, snapshots, NSGs, Azure Load Balancer, Azure Backup / Recovery Services vault.
· IIS administration: sites, application pools, bindings, SSL certificate installation and renewal.
· Monitoring operations with Zabbix (or Nagios/PRTG/similar with willingness to run Zabbix): items, triggers, alert handling and tuning.
· Patch-management discipline: change requests, snapshot/rollback planning, maintenance windows, post-patch validation.
· SFTP server administration (Bitvise SSH Server or comparable).
· Working networking knowledge: NSG rules, ports and protocols, VPN gateway basics, load-balancing concepts and health probes.
· Strong written English for reports and multi-party email coordination (client, application team, product vendor).
· Willingness to work the UK-hours shift and carry P1/P2 on-call.

Work arrangement
No