Azure Solutions Architect

About us

Acting to combat climate change is one of the world's most pressing challenges. Climate Friendly was founded in 2003 as a profit-for-purpose business. Our growing team is passionate about active land management, and we are focused on finding economically viable solutions to maximise our impact on climate change.

We are one of Australia's largest and most experienced carbon farming project developers. This includes more than 160 projects with farmers, plantation managers, agribusiness, and Indigenous groups on carbon farming projects.

Climate Friendly has delivered over 20Mt in carbon abatement as at the end of 2020. Our immediate mission is to establish partnerships, by 2025, that will store or reduce 150Mt of CO2-e, while repairing nature and supporting reconciliation. Join our team and you will be helping to build A productive, sustainable land sector that contributes to a zero net emissions & nature positive Australia by 2050

We have a genuinely friendly and supportive culture where everyone has a voice and opportunity to help shape our future and to fulfil our purpose.

The role

As Azure Solutions Architect, you will play a strategic role in enabling Climate Friendly's data, geospatial, and platform capabilities.

The role can be based anywhere in Australia, with flexibility to work fully remotely or in a hybrid capacity from home and one of our office locations.

The role is responsible for designing, deploying, and maintaining scalable, secure, and high-performing Azure cloud infrastructure that underpins critical business systems, applications, and platforms. This includes supporting both Geospatial Engineering and Platforms teams while contributing to broader IT systems, cloud governance, and innovation across the organisation.

The role ensures that evolving systems, applications, and services are built on a robust, efficient, and cost-optimised cloud foundation, enabling Climate Friendly to continue scaling its impact.

Key responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Architecting and managing Azure networking components including VNets, subnets, NSGs, DNS, routing, and load balancers.
• Designing and maintaining secure network architecture in Azure, including private endpoints, service endpoints, ExpressRoute circuits, and VPN gateways for hybrid connectivity.
• Implementing cloud security best practices, including encryption, key management, Azure AD integration, RBAC, identity governance, and threat protection.
• Establishing and maintaining role-based access control, policies, and compliance frameworks in collaboration with IT and security teams.
• Monitoring and optimising cloud system performance, availability, cost, and security, including responding to alerts through Azure Security Centre, Sentinel, and other monitoring tools.
• Supporting infrastructure automation, infrastructure-as-code deployments (Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates), and operational resilience.
• Maintaining infrastructure documentation including architecture diagrams, deployment procedures, access controls, and security configurations.
• Collaborating with engineers, product managers, and data scientists to ensure infrastructure supports secure and efficient access to backend systems and APIs.
• Advising on cloud governance, cost optimisation, performance tuning, and resource allocation to align infrastructure with organisational priorities.
• Leading incident response, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis for infrastructure-related issues.
• Supporting the deployment of performant APIs and services for both spatial and non-spatial data access.
• Communicating infrastructure decisions, strategies, and standards to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

This position is being offered as a 12-month fixed term contract in the first instance, with the possibility of extension or permanency subject to business needs and performance.

About you

Essential

• 8+ years in cloud engineering or architecture, with deep hands-on experience in Microsoft Azure and the Azure Well-Architected Framework.
• Strong knowledge of Azure networking (VNets, VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute, DNS, Load Balancers).
• Deep experience with Azure AD, RBAC, and identity/access management.
• Proven expertise with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Bicep, ARM templates).
• Familiarity with secure hybrid cloud connectivity and enterprise-grade VPN solutions.
• Knowledge of Azure Policy, Blueprints, and Defender for Cloud.
• Experience with monitoring and alerting tools (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics).
• Demonstrated ability in cloud performance optimisation and cost management.
• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills, with ability to collaborate across technical and business domains.

Desirable

• Supporting ML/AI workloads in cloud environments (e.g., Databricks, ).
• Familiarity with spatial data formats (e.g., GeoTIFF, shapefiles, point clouds) and spatial databases.
• Experience with containerisation (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Exposure to monitoring and logging frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).
• Interest in sustainability and contributing to climate-positive technology solutions.

Climate Friendly encourages people from different backgrounds to apply, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people from different cultural backgrounds and people with disabilities.

Why join our team?

Our goal is to be seen as an organisation that supports wholeness, lifestyle and wellbeing whilst rewarding individual and collective performance. In addition to competitive salary and transparent career progression opportunities, our benefits include:

• Work with purpose, contributing to a productive, sustainable land sector that contributes to a zero net emissions and nature positive Australia by 2050
• A fully hybrid workplace - work to your own rhythm and balance connection and productivity
• A supportive and inclusive environment that promotes diversity
• 2 all staff events a year to connect with your friends and colleagues
• Christmas holiday - 3 days of additional leave each year
• Floating public holidays
• Gender neutral paid parental leave
• 2 days each year for training / development / study leave
• Home office setup and refresh allowance
• Company performance bonus and shared equity