Manuel Arce  new_releases

Principal Consultant and senior Azure engineer with 20+ years in IT infrastructure and 8+ years designing, building and operating Azure platforms for U.S. customers of a managed services provider and Microsoft CSP partner. Since 2021 I have been the hands-on technical lead on 25+ statements of work for clients in banking, credit unions, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and software. What I do: • Identity and access: Microsoft Entra ID, Conditional Access, multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO with SAML and OIDC), Privileged Identity Management, role-based access control (RBAC) and custom roles, AD FS to Entra ID migrations, hybrid Active Directory • Azure landing zones built as code: Cloud Adoption Framework, Bicep and ALZ-Bicep, Azure Policy, management groups, Azure Lighthouse across 40+ tenants, CI/CD for infrastructure with Azure DevOps pipelines • Networking and edge security: VPN Gateway, Private Endpoints, Azure Firewall, Application Gateway and WAF, API security through Azure API Management and WAF policies, FortiGate, Sophos, VeloCloud SD-WAN • Business continuity and IT disaster recovery: Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup, Veeam, Zerto; RTO/RPO design, test failovers and runbooks • Security operations and corporate compliance: Microsoft Sentinel, Defender for Cloud and Endpoint, Intune baselines, MDR onboarding, HIPAA and CIS control alignment, Zero Trust • Azure Virtual Desktop: pooled and personal host pools, FSLogix, scaling plans, Trusted Launch, image lifecycle • Microsoft 365 migrations: Exchange and Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, tenant-to-tenant with BitTitan, Active Directory forest consolidation • Platform operations: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics and KQL, alerting as code, PowerShell automation, troubleshooting and root-cause analysis as the escalation point; working knowledge of AKS and microservices patterns from supporting application teams; I also build internal tooling in ASP.NET Core and React How I work: I run discovery and design workshops, build and test, coordinate production cutovers, document, and hand over to 24/7 managed operations. I am the escalation point for hard networking, identity and DR problems. Previously I led a team of 11 cloud engineers as a Cloud Solution Architect Manager. Certifications: Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305), Azure Network Engineer Associate (AZ-700), Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty (AZ-140), Microsoft Certified Trainer, ISO/IEC 27001 Internal Auditor. Based in Costa Rica, working U.S. Eastern and Mountain hours. Open to remote roles (employee or contractor) and to relocating to the U.S. or Canada. Spanish native, professional English.