Azure Consultant

£65,000-£80,000 depending on experience Hybrid - Birchwood, Warrington Full-time, permanent - 37.5 hours per week

About Synextra

We're Synextra, an independent Azure specialist helping businesses get more from their technology. Our customers include law firms, financial services organisations and other businesses where reliable, secure systems are essential to getting the job done.

We're small by design, with technical depth, direct customer relationships and a strong sense of responsibility for the environments we build and manage. Customers work closely with the people making technical decisions, and our engineers have the opportunity to see their work make a real difference.

We're looking for an Azure Consultant who enjoys understanding a customer's problem, designing the right solution and getting hands-on to deliver it.

The role

You'll design and build Azure solutions for customers, taking projects from discovery and architecture through implementation, testing and handover.

That could mean planning a migration, building an Azure landing zone, improving an existing environment or helping a customer move towards managed platform services. You'll work across environments of different sizes and levels of maturity, making practical decisions about security, reliability, performance and cost.

You'll also support our sales team with technical discovery, solution design and project scoping. You'll help customers understand their options, explain the trade-offs and make sure our proposals reflect what it will actually take to deliver a good outcome.

The core of the role is customer architecture and project delivery. You'll work alongside our cloud engineering, platform and security colleagues, drawing on their expertise and contributing your own.

What you'll be doing

Understanding customers and designing solutions

• Lead technical discovery sessions to understand business objectives, existing systems, dependencies and constraints.

• Assess customer environments and recommend practical approaches to migration, modernisation and improvement.

• Produce clear architecture diagrams and high-level and detailed designs that explain how the solution works and why you've chosen it.

• Design Azure environments covering networking, identity, compute, storage, security, governance and resilience.

• Build monitoring, backup, disaster recovery and ongoing support requirements into your designs from the outset.

• Estimate Azure running costs and explain the implications of different design choices.

Building and delivering

• Take technical ownership of customer projects, from an agreed design through to a working production environment.

• Build and configure Azure infrastructure and services, using Terraform and automation to make deployments repeatable and maintainable.

• Plan and deliver migrations, including dependency checks, testing, cutover and rollback arrangements.

• Troubleshoot issues during implementation and work with colleagues, customers and third parties to resolve them.

• Keep customers and project managers informed about progress, risks and decisions.

• Deliver clear documentation and a thorough handover so our cloud engineering team can confidently support what you've built.

Supporting pre-sales

• Join customer conversations alongside our sales team to explore requirements and shape appropriate solutions.

• Contribute technical proposals, statements of work and realistic estimates of delivery effort.

• Make scope, assumptions, dependencies and exclusions clear before a project starts.

• Present recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders in straightforward language.

• Challenge requirements constructively when a simpler, safer or more cost-effective approach would serve the customer better.

What you'll bring

• Practical experience designing and implementing Microsoft Azure solutions in production.

• A strong understanding of Azure networking, identity, compute and storage, including how they connect to existing customer infrastructure.

• Experience delivering migrations or infrastructure projects, with responsibility for technical decisions and outcomes.

• Confidence leading customer discussions, asking useful questions and explaining your recommendations.

• The ability to turn requirements into clear designs, implementation plans and documentation.

• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, ideally Terraform, and scripting or automation.

• Sound judgement about security, availability, recovery and cost.

• The ability to recognise risks, ask for specialist input when needed and follow through on commitments.

You don't need to know every Azure service. We're interested in the depth of your understanding, the quality of your decisions and the work you've delivered.

You might already be working as an Azure Consultant, or be an experienced cloud engineer with substantial design and project delivery experience who wants greater involvement in customer discovery and architecture.

Useful additional experience

• Working within a Microsoft partner, consultancy or managed service provider.

• Supporting pre-sales, estimating project effort or writing statements of work.

• Azure landing zones, the Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected reviews.

• Azure Virtual Desktop, hybrid connectivity, Azure SQL or application services such as App Service and Azure Functions.

• Delivering solutions for regulated organisations.

• Microsoft certifications such as Azure Administrator Associate or Azure Solutions Architect Expert.

How we work

We value people who take ownership, share their knowledge and care about the customer's outcome. That me