Job Description & Details
This is a hands-on, infrastructure-heavy contract role focused on stabilizing and scaling cloud-native deployments for a major enterprise. You'll spend your days wrangling Azure environments, making GitHub Actions pipelines actually work, and ensuring observability isn't just an afterthought.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You'll be jumping straight into the deep end, designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions and YAML while tying in Maven-based Java build processes. Expect to spend a significant chunk of your time managing container workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) via Helm charts, building images with Docker or Podman, and wrestling with Azure API Management (APIM). Half your battle will be keeping the infrastructure transparent by instrumenting everything in Datadog and building custom monitors that actually flag real incidents rather than generating alert fatigue.
The Core Tech Stack
Your absolute bread and butter here is Azure Cloud paired with GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC) and GitHub Actions. You can't fake your way past the AKS and containerization requirements; you need to genuinely know how to orchestrate workloads using Docker or Podman. On top of that, deep Datadog instrumentation experience is non-negotiable because the client expects full-stack observability right out of the gate.
Interview Expectations
Expect the technical interviewers to press you hard on failure scenarios in GitHub Actions and Kubernetes. They'll likely ask you to walk through how you would troubleshoot a Java build pipeline that keeps failing intermittently inside an AKS cluster, and they'll want to hear about your strategy for optimizing Datadog trace sampling to manage costs while retaining deep visibility. They aren't looking for textbook definitions; they want to hear war stories about how you debugged production bottlenecks under pressure.
Application Advice
Make sure your resume doesn't just list tools, but explicitly highlights complex pipelines you've built from scratch. You'll want to heavily pepper your experience section with exact matches for 'GitHub Actions', 'Azure Kubernetes Service', 'GHEC', and 'Datadog' to safely clear their automated resume screeners, then back those keywords up with concrete examples of how you improved deployment velocity or system reliability in past roles.