Cloud Engineer, Automation (Remote Ontario)

The Cloud Engineer (Automation) is responsible for designing, building, operating and improving production-grade automation for Smile Digital Health, its clients and partners. This role will be responsible for the pipelines, infrastructure as code, environments and recovery procedures, that the platform runs on.

This Engineer will merge direct platform engineering expertise with driving strategic changes in how the department designs, deploys, and maintains its infrastructure. Key responsibilities include managing build and release engineering, orchestrating the Terraform and Helm infrastructure, provisioning on-demand environments, and implementing automated recovery. This role works closely with Platform Engineering, Solution Engineering, Service Operations and Engineering Practice & QA to remove unnecessary repetitive, manual work and effectively optimize a build from the time the client commits to a running environment faster, decrease platform costs, and utilize AI to enhance the platform’s engineering and operations.

• Own build and release engineering by reviewing the current repositories and CI setup, then consolidate duplicated Azure DevOps pipeline YAML onto shared reusable templates with change detection and automated quality gates.
• Identify and eliminate manual efforts for cross-functional teams and replace them with scheduled, auditable automation. For example, automating patching, certificate and secret rotation, environment scaling, and recurring reports
• Implement GitOps-based continuous delivery - declarative, Git-driven deployments with automated reconciliation, drift detection and rollback.
• Automate line-of-business environments end to end, provisioned and torn down on demand across every Azure service and application involved.
• Automate business continuity and disaster recovery through backup validation, restore and failover, recurring DR drills, and measured RTO and RPO.
• Ensure Helm and Terraform are easy to upgrade by charting reuse and configuration validation, versioned modules, and state boundaries that limit how far an upgrade reaches.
• Run in-cluster platform services deployed through Helm, harden workloads for availability and capacity: health probes, replica counts, and right-sized requests, limits and autoscaling.
• Ensure that the Terraform configuration is regularly maintained.
• Build and maintain Build Agent images for streamlining tooling available for the builds.
• Automate the guardrails such as policy-as-code, security and IaC scanning in the pipeline, and alerts and dashboards defined as code.
• Implement AI-assisted engineering in the platform team’s day-to-day work
• Contribute to the department’s AI enablement, package knowledge into reusable skills and runbooks in the shared skill library.
• Work with the development and operations teams to find automation gaps, prioritize them, and close them.
• Troubleshoot production and staging issues and document what you automate so others can operate it.

• 6+ years of hands-on cloud engineering, DevOps and/or platform engineering experience, including at least 1-2+ years with infrastructure as code and CI/CD automation on Microsoft Azure in production.
• Post-secondary education in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar and/or equivalent work experience.
• Practical in-depth knowledge and expertise in Terraform, Helm and Azure DevOps pipelines, and GitOps delivery (Argo CD or Flux).
• Strong Terraform skills including, but not limited to, experience with module design, provider version management, state management and refactoring.
• Expertise in Helm chart authoring and refactoring, including recent experience with Kubernetes and AKS.
• Demonstrated knowledge across Azure (AKS, Key Vault, Storage, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, networking, identity) and observability as code (Azure Monitor and/or Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).
• Hands-on experience automating backup, restore and failover with measured RTO and RPO.
• Hands-on experience with agentic coding tools (Claude Code or equivalent), keeping confidential data out of them and reviewing what they produce.
• Hands-on experience running, hardening and right-sizing production workloads on Kubernetes
• Hands-on Kafka operations: topic and partition design, consumer group sizing, and throughput and latency trade-offs. Experience migrating between Kafka platforms (HDInsight, Confluent, MSK or self-managed) is a strong asset.
• Strong Python and Bash skills, able to build maintainable tooling, not glue scripts.
• A demonstrable record of replacing manual processes with automation.
• FinOps practice and Azure Cost Management, an asset.
• Regulated environment experience (healthcare, PHI), an asset.
• Certifications: HashiCorp Terraform Associate; Microsoft AZ-104, AZ-400, AZ-305; CKA or CKAD, an asset.
• Observability as code with Azure Monitor, Grafana, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry; Azure cost optimization, an asset.