Azure AVD cloud engineer placed with a US-based MSSP

Context

The client is a US-based managed security services provider supporting regulated small and mid-size businesses. Azure Virtual Desktop had grown from an occasional project to a core offering, with conditional access, FSLogix profile management and Sentinel-based monitoring all needing to come together in each deployment.

Challenge

The skill set the client needed sits in a narrow overlap — Azure Virtual Desktop in production, plus the security stack that wraps it. The role had been open for two months internally; most candidates had either AVD certification without production scars, or general Azure experience without specific AVD operations work.

The client also could not afford a long ramp. AVD profile and image issues were already escalating to senior engineers who needed to be working on different problems.

Approach

We ran a single role through a focused screen. Over 100 applications came through the funnel; the filter was deliberately tight:

• Hands-on experience operating AVD in production environments (image lifecycle, FSLogix tuning, golden image governance)
• Comfort with the security overlay: conditional access policies, Defender for Endpoint integration, Sentinel rules and alerts
• Practical troubleshooting style, demonstrated through a live exercise with the client's senior engineer rather than a written test

Outcome

The engineer started inside four weeks of the brief landing. They overlap roughly four hours daily with US Eastern time and operate as an embedded member of the MSSP's cloud team — not as an arm's-length contractor.

The senior engineers on the client side have got their time back, and AVD work no longer escalates by default.