Senior DevOps Consultant

Hilltop Partner Network (HPN) is seeking an experienced, highly autonomous Senior DevOps Consultant to manage, harden, and optimize the cloud infrastructure powering our proprietary, AI-first consulting management platform. This part-time contract role is structured specifically to support a lean technical team. The incoming consultant will serve as a critical technical co-pilot to the CTO, taking full operational ownership of Azure environments, Terraform codebases, and deployment pipelines, thereby insulating our full-stack developers to maintain high-velocity feature delivery and QA automation. The Senior DevOps Consultant represents our critical infrastructure safeguard. By owning the continuous stability, compliance, and performance of our Azure and GitHub pipelines, the consultant ensures that our internal developers remain 100% insulated from infrastructure friction. In parallel, the role enforces strict infrastructure cost control and security standards. Role Overview and Commercial TermsPosition Title: Senior DevOps Consultant (SaaS & Cloud Infrastructure) Engagement Model: Part-Time Service Agreement Time Commitment: Capped at 8 hours per week (1 business day equivalent) with absolute 'pens down' enforcement on routine tasks Hourly Compensation: $100.00 – $150.00 CAD per hour (commensurate with senior-tier technical expertise) Location: 100% remote within Canada (Western Canada region preferred) Reporting Structure: Reports directly to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Key Areas of AccountabilityThe Senior DevOps Consultant will maintain absolute hands-on ownership of the following domains: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Management: Maintain, refactor, and secure the ha-infrastructure and terraform-modules repositories on Azure. Uphold a strict code-first infrastructure model, ensuring that 100% of staging and production services are defined declaratively in Terraform, eliminating untracked manual portal modifications.CI/CD Pipeline & Orchestration Ownership: Manage and optimize GitHub Actions and Azure workflows across Censtra's modular repositories. This includes the Next.js NextAuth/tRPC front-end portal (t3portal), asynchronous background task queues (automation-worker, notifications-worker), and our Python-based AI RAG document processing pipeline (rfx-processing).Network Security & Environment Hardening: Enforce strict logical and network segregation between the Staging and Production virtual networks (VNets). Maintain private network security, including configuring Network Security Groups (NSGs), routing traffic via Private Endpoints, managing the Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN Gateway, and executing our roadmap goal of migrating the VPN to Entra ID (Azure AD) federated authentication for seamless user lifecycle management.Secrets Management & Application Compliance: Own Azure Key Vault integrations. Ensure that all runtime credentials, PostgreSQL database connection strings, OIDC federated identity trust relationships, and API integrations (e.g., BoldSign e-signatures, Braintree payments, and private Azure OpenAI endpoints) are securely injected via Managed Identities, eliminating static secrets and credential leakage in commit histories.Vulnerability Management & Secure Score Optimization: Proactively monitor and remediate vulnerabilities reported by Microsoft Defender for Cloud and integrated repository scanners (Semgrep, ESLint, pip-audit). Take hands-on ownership of upgrading third-party dependencies and Docker base image Ubuntu packages to patch active CVEs. Maintain our hard target Azure Secure Score baseline above 89%.Operational Cost Control & Right-Sizing: Execute cloud cost-optimization strategies. Lead the decommissioning of redundant/legacy cloud resources (e.g., consolidating premium private Azure DNS zones to yield immediate recurring monthly savings). Implement auto-scaling policies, right-size database tiers (PostgreSQL Flexible Server auto-grow parameters), and configure strict Tokens Per Minute (TPM) ceilings in Azure AI Studio to prevent catastrophic run-away token billing overages.Adherence to Infrastructure Governance & Process Standards: To protect live environments, the consultant must strictly adhere to and champion our established Azure Infrastructure Change Protocol. This workflow ensures that technical agility is never prioritized at the expense of production stability. Requirements & QualificationsThe ideal candidate must demonstrate deep technical mastery and the ability to operate with autonomy: Minimum 8-10 years of professional software development and system administration experience, with a heavy emphasis on cloud architecture and automation.Demonstrated mastery of Microsoft Azure PaaS environments, specifically Azure Container Apps, Azure Functions (consumption & premium tiers), Azure Key Vault, Private Endpoints, virtual networks, and Log Analytics/Application Insights.Advanced proficiency in Terraform, including designing modular, reusable modules, managing secure remote state backends, and configuring OIDC federated identity providers.Expert knowledge of GitHub Actions CI/CD orchestration, including branch protection rules, mandatory quality checks, automated dependency updates (Dependabot), and deployment security rules.Solid foundation in DevSecOps principles, including static code analysis (Semgrep, ESLint), secrets scanning, and automated container image scanning.Deep understanding of database and storage architectures, including PostgreSQL management (Prisma ORM configurations), Azure Storage Queues, and Dockerized graph databases (Neo4j).Familiarity with AI/ML cloud hosting infrastructure (Azure OpenAI Service, TPM/RPM quota budgeting, private network integration for AI services) is highly desirable.Strong, structured communication skills - able to coordinate release planning with developers and maintain lean, up-to-date engineering wiki documentation.Proven ability to operate as an independent contractor, managing deliverables strictly within a tight 8-hour weekly time budget. How to ApplyBy email with your consulting profile/CV to careers@hilltoppn.com, Attn: Shota Megrelishvili. Please include details on your Azure, Terraform, and GitHub Actions experience in the application.