AHEAD

Principal Technical Consultant - AI/Cloud Platform Engineering

AHEAD
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10 days ago
Chicago, IL, USA or New York, NY, USAStaff+

Base Salary

$230k - $290k/yr

Responsibilities

  • Translate client business and operational challenges into Azure, migration, governance, or AI agent solutions.
  • Lead junior and mid-level consultants by setting technical direction, reviewing work, removing blockers, and mentoring them.
  • Scope workstreams, define deliverables, estimate effort, and keep client engagements on plan.
  • Build client relationships and identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
  • Lead Azure discovery, architecture assessments, workload inventories, dependency mapping, and cloud readiness assessments.
  • Design and deploy enterprise-scale Azure landing zones with networking, policy, identity, and RBAC foundations.
  • Plan and execute Azure migrations, including workload assessment, right-sizing, migration sequencing, cutover, and validation.
  • Establish hybrid connectivity using ExpressRoute, VPN gateways, and DNS strategies.
  • Own Azure cost governance and FinOps practices, including budgets, alerts, tagging, reservations, savings plans, and chargeback reporting.
  • Design and deploy isolated Microsoft Foundry environments with private networking, managed identity, RBAC, and customer-managed keys.
  • Establish Copilot Studio governance, environment strategy, DLP controls, connector governance, generative AI settings, and licensing guidance.
  • Build GitHub Actions promotion pipelines with automated tests, evaluation thresholds, and approval gates.
  • Design evaluation and safety frameworks using golden datasets, quality, retrieval, and safety evaluators.
  • Develop agents with the Foundry SDK and Copilot Studio and establish solution lifecycle management through pipelines.
  • Advise on model selection and placement across the Foundry catalog using residency, inference location, and cost constraints.
  • Author design documents, as-builts, build guides, technical roadmaps, runbooks, review packages, and governance evidence.
  • Run client workshops, enablement sessions, and office hours.

Requirements

  • 8+ years of experience in engineering or technical consulting.
  • 5+ years delivering Azure infrastructure, landing zones, or migrations.
  • At least 18 months delivering GenAI or agent systems to production.
  • Experience leading small consulting or engineering teams on client engagements.
  • Hands-on experience with Cloud Adoption Framework landing zones, Azure Migrate discovery and migration, hub-spoke or Virtual WAN networking, and enterprise workload right-sizing.
  • Hands-on design and implementation across Azure compute, storage, networking, databases, containers, identity, and security.
  • Hands-on Microsoft Foundry experience, including the account and project model, the current azure-ai-projects Python SDK, versioned agent deployments, model catalog management, and Azure AI Search retrieval.
  • Hands-on Copilot Studio experience with generative orchestration, environment administration, DLP and connector governance, agent identity, and solution-based ALM using the pac CLI.
  • Infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform, Bicep, or ARM.
  • Experience building GitHub Actions workflows with environments, protection rules, and OIDC federation to Azure.
  • Ability to design evaluation datasets and thresholds for evaluation-driven agent promotion.
  • Strong consulting communication skills, including design documentation, technical roadmaps, executive presentations, and governance-board communication.
  • Preferred Microsoft credentials include AZ-305, AZ-104, AZ-400, AI-103, AB-100, Copilot Studio Applied Skills, or AZ-500.
  • Preferred HashiCorp Terraform Associate and GitHub Actions GH-200 certifications.
  • Experience in regulated or confidentiality-driven industries is preferred.
  • Microsoft Purview, Application Insights tracing for agent workloads, Copilot Agent Kit, Power Platform administration, and AI governance-board experience are preferred.

Tech Stack

AzureGitHub ActionsPythonTerraform

Categories

Solutions Engineering
AHEAD

About AHEAD

1,001-5,000 employees
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