← All roles

Principal Technical Consultant - AI/ Azure Cloud Platform Engineering

AHEAD· Digital Solutions Group – Platform Engineering
Apply on company site
Hybrid (Chicago, IL; New York, NY)$190k - $220kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

A hands-on senior consulting role in AHEAD’s AI platform engineering practice, delivering end-to-end Azure-based solutions for AI agent platforms, guiding client engagements from discovery through production and enabling client teams to operate independently.

Responsibilities

  • Work directly with client stakeholders to interpret business and operational challenges and translate them into technical solutions (Azure landing zone, migration wave, or agentic platform).
  • Lead junior and mid-level consultants on engagements, set technical direction, review work, unblock teams, and develop delivery owners.
  • Shape engagements with account teams, scope workstreams, define deliverables, estimate effort, and adapt to changing client priorities.
  • Build and maintain client relationships beyond the current SOW and identify upsell opportunities.
  • Serve as the senior technical voice in steering sessions, presenting options with tradeoffs and clear recommendations.
  • Lead Azure discovery and assessment engagements (current-state reviews, inventories, dependency mapping, cloud readiness).
  • Design and deploy enterprise-scale Azure landing zones with governance, networking, and identity foundations.
  • Plan and execute migrations to Azure, including workload assessment, sequencing, runbooks, and post-migration validation.
  • Establish hybrid connectivity (ExpressRoute, VPN, DNS) to connect on-prem environments to Azure.
  • Own cost governance and FinOps practices (budgets, tagging, RI/Savings plans, showback/chargeback).
  • Design and deploy Microsoft Foundry environments with network isolation, private endpoints, KBs on RBAC and keys.
  • Stand up Copilot Studio governance, including environment strategies, DLP, governance, and licensing guidance.
  • Build GitHub Actions promotion pipelines for agents from sandbox to production with automated tests and gates.
  • Implement evaluation and safety frameworks (golden datasets, quality evaluators, safeguards).
  • Develop agents using Foundry SDK (Python) and Copilot Studio, enabling environment-based ALM.
  • Advise clients on model selection and placement across Foundry catalog with data residency and in-region inference considerations.
  • Author design documents, runbooks, roadmaps, and build guides; run workshops and enablement sessions.
  • Prepare review packages and evidence for client AI governance boards; maintain decision registers.

Qualifications

  • 8+ years 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.
  • Delivery leadership experience with small consulting or engineering teams.
  • Strong solution framing and ability to translate ambiguous problems into concrete architectures.
  • Hands-on Azure platform core services experience (compute, storage, networking, databases, containers, identity, security).
  • Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio, and Azure AI tooling experience (or equivalent) including SDKs and governance workflows.
  • IaC and CI/CD ownership (Terraform, Bicep/ARM; GitHub Actions with environments and OIDC).
  • Evaluation-driven delivery mindset with data-driven datasets and thresholds for agent promotions.
  • Excellent consulting-grade communication for executives, governance boards, and security teams.

Skills

Required:Azure landing zonesAzure MigrateTerraform / Bicep / ARMGitHub ActionsFoundry SDK (Python)Copilot StudioGenAI / agent systems

Benefits

  • Remote work option
  • Competitive full-time salary (USD 190,000 - 220,000)
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
AHEAD logo

About AHEAD

Digital Platforms Engineered for Modern Enterprises

AHEAD accelerates the impact of technology on clients by engineering customized data, developer, and infrastructure platforms that improve IT operations.

Platform SolutionsInfrastructure ModernizationLifecycle ManagementSeamless Integration
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at AHEAD