Senior Platform Engineer - Azure Data & AI Platform

About the role

Howden, a global insurance group, is looking for a senior platform engineer to build and operate its Azure-based data and AI platform. The work is hands-on infrastructure and platform engineering: writing Terraform, designing network architecture, implementing MLOps pipelines and setting up DevSecOps patterns. It is not a thought-leadership or strategy role.

Key responsibilities

• Azure platform engineering: design landing zones, management groups and subscriptions; build hub-spoke networks with segmentation; implement Azure Policy, RBAC and governance; manage identity with Entra ID; set up monitoring, logging and alerting with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics and Application Insights; apply cost management and FinOps.
• Databricks and data platform: deploy Azure Databricks workspaces with Unity Catalog, help data and AI teams with pipelines, set cluster policies, job scheduling and notebook standards, integrate with ADLS Gen2, Azure SQL and Synapse, and set up CI/CD for notebooks, jobs and infrastructure.
• MLOps and AI platform: build ML deployment pipelines with Azure ML, Databricks MLflow or both, implement model versioning, experiment tracking and model registries, set up batch and real-time inference endpoints, create reusable ML pipeline templates, integrate Azure OpenAI and Cognitive Services, and apply responsible AI guardrails.
• DevSecOps and platform enablement: build CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions with security scanning, implement shift-left security, establish Terraform (or Bicep) standards, create self-service tooling, write documentation and take part in on-call rotation.

Required profile

• 5+ years of platform/infrastructure engineering on production platforms.
• Deep Azure knowledge of networking, IAM, storage, compute and PaaS services.
• Databricks experience: workspaces, Unity Catalog, Spark jobs and cost management.
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform (preferred) or Bicep, including modules and state management.
• CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions with gates, approvals and security scanning.
• Containerization of applications and ML/AI models, observability beyond basic metrics, and a security-first mindset.
• Preferred: Azure landing zones and Cloud Adoption Framework, Microsoft Purview, Delta Lake, AKS, API Management, and Azure networking certifications.

Required skills

• Terraform or Bicep
• Azure (networking, Entra ID, Azure ML, Databricks, Azure DevOps)
• CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions)
• Python and/or PowerShell
• Containerization and AKS (preferred)

What we offer

• Remote-first work with occasional in-office travel.
• Learning budget for conferences, training and certifications.
• Equipment and licenses needed to do the job.
• Engineering culture with PRs, branching, tests, blameless post-mortems and RFCs.
• Permanent position.