I'd been passively open to opportunities for a few months when a specialist cloud recruiter reached out on LinkedIn with a role that was worth reading past the first line.
A Dublin cloud company was rebuilding their Azure platform team from the ground up, and they wanted a senior architect who'd designed for scale. The recruiter had done their homework before messaging me. The pitch was specific, the timing was right, so I agreed to an exploratory call. Within the first week I'd had an initial screen with the recruiter and moved quickly into the loop itself. Over the next two weeks I went through five rounds. The early stages were conversational: culture fit, broad technical background, how I handled stakeholder communication on large infrastructure projects. Then it escalated fast. The hardest piece was a 90-minute whiteboard session focused entirely on multi-region failover strategy. They handed me a realistic, messy scenario and expected me to reason through trade-offs out loud, justify my decisions, and push back on constraints that didn't make sense. It was hard, and I respected that. Right after came a written architecture document with a 48-hour turnaround. I spent most of those 48 hours on it. The whiteboard and the ↓