Principal Technical Consultant – AI/Cloud Platform Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Illinois, +1 more state.

📋 Description

• Evaluate the current states of clients and convert business and operational challenges into Azure landing zones, migration waves, or agentic platforms.

• Guide junior and mid-level consultants by establishing technical direction, reviewing their work, removing obstacles to delivery, and nurturing their development.

• Collaborate with account teams to define the scope of workstreams, outline deliverables, estimate efforts, and ensure that delivery remains on track.

• Foster client relationships while identifying opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.

• Act as the senior technical voice during client steering and working sessions.

• Lead Azure discovery and assessment projects, which include architecture reviews, workload and application inventories, dependency mapping, and cloud readiness evaluations.

• Design and implement enterprise-scale Azure landing zones in accordance with the Cloud Adoption Framework.

• Strategize and carry out Azure migrations utilizing workload assessments, right-sizing, migration wave sequencing, cutover runbooks, and post-migration validations.

• Establish hybrid and cross-premises connectivity through ExpressRoute, VPN gateways, and DNS strategies.

• Manage cost governance and FinOps practices, which encompass budgets, alerts, tagging, reserved instances, savings plans, and showback or chargeback reporting.

• Design and deploy network-isolated Microsoft Foundry environments that include private endpoints, private DNS, subnet delegation, managed identity, RBAC, and customer-managed keys.

• Develop governance for Copilot Studio, covering environment strategy, DLP baselines, connector governance, generative AI settings, channel approval workflows, and licensing/capacity guidance.

• Create GitHub Actions promotion pipelines with automated testing, evaluation thresholds, and human approval gates.

• Implement evaluation and safety frameworks using golden datasets, quality, retrieval, and safety evaluators within CI.

• Develop agents utilizing the Foundry SDK (Python) and Copilot Studio while establishing pipeline-based ALM.

• Provide guidance on model selection and placement within the Foundry catalog, including OpenAI and Anthropic models, while considering data residency, in-region inference, and cost implications.

• Write design documents, as-built reports, build guides, technical roadmaps, and runbooks.

• Conduct workshops, enablement sessions, and office hours for client makers, developers, and administrators.

• Compile review packages and evidence for client AI governance boards and maintain decision registers.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of experience in engineering or technical consulting, including more than 5 years in delivering Azure infrastructure, landing zones, or migrations, with at least 18 months devoted to delivering GenAI or agent systems into production.

• Proven experience leading small consulting or engineering teams on client projects, which includes assigning and reviewing tasks, mentoring junior consultants, and being accountable for engagement outcomes.

• Ability to transform ambiguous client challenges into clear architectures, including platform selection, data boundaries, and governance pathways to production.

• Practical experience in delivering Cloud Adoption Framework landing zones, Azure Migrate-based discovery and migration, hub-spoke or Virtual WAN network design, and workload right-sizing at an enterprise scale.

• Hands-on expertise in designing and implementing across Azure services, including compute, storage, networking, databases, containers, identity, and security, such as VNets, private endpoints, private DNS, managed identities, Entra ID, and RBAC.

• Demonstrated experience with the Microsoft Foundry account and project model, current azure-ai-projects Python SDK, versioned agent deployments, model catalog management, and Azure AI Search for retrieval in isolated environments.

• Proven track record of building Copilot Studio agents incorporating generative orchestration, environment administration, DLP and connector governance, agent identity, and solution-based ALM with the pac CLI.

• Familiarity with infrastructure as code using Terraform, Bicep, or ARM; GitHub Actions workflows inclusive of environments, protection rules, and OIDC federation to Azure.

• Capability to design evaluation datasets and thresholds for evaluation-driven agent delivery.

• Exceptional consulting-grade communication skills, including the ability to create executable design documents and technical roadmaps, as well as the ability to articulate and defend technical decisions to executives, security teams, and governance boards.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and performance-based bonuses.

• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits.

• Opportunities for professional development and continuing education.

• Flexible work arrangements and a supportive work-life balance.

• A collaborative and inclusive work environment.