Azure AI Architect

📍 Choice of office locations: Manchester / London / Ipswich / Tunbridge Wells (Hybrid – 3 days onsite)

Our client is seeking an experienced Azure AI Architect to lead the architecture, design, and delivery of enterprise‑grade AI solutions on Microsoft Azure. You will define and govern reference architectures that enable secure, scalable, and cost‑efficient AI capabilities across intelligent document processing, generative AI applications, and retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) platforms.

This is a hands‑on role, working closely with business stakeholders, security, data, and engineering teams to translate business requirements into production‑ready AI solutions while setting technical standards and best practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design of RAG architectures, including vectorisation, indexing, chunking, grounding, and citation strategies.
• Produce architectural artefacts such as ADRs, guardrails, and reusable blueprints.
• Design end‑to‑end solutions covering API contracts, integration patterns (Azure Functions, Logic Apps, event‑driven architectures), and observability.
• Architect document intelligence pipelines (OCR, classification, extraction) and integrate with downstream enterprise systems.
• Define and assure non‑functional requirements across performance, availability, resilience, security, and cost.
• Implement identity, access, and security controls (Entra ID, RBAC, Key Vault, Private Endpoints).
• Embed Responsible AI and compliance practices, including governance, safety controls, and data privacy.
• Define MLOps and observability standards, monitoring latency, cost, model performance, and quality.
• Mentor engineers on prompt engineering, grounding techniques, and GenAI best practices.

Required Experience

• 15+ years’ experience in software or solution architecture
• 7+ years in Azure
• 5+ years in AI/ML or Azure AI solutioning
• Strong knowledge of LLMs, embeddings, and RAG design
• Excellent understanding of cloud security, identity, and compliance (GDPR, ISO controls)
• Hands‑on development experience in Python and/or C#
• Azure Machine Learning pipelines and model registries
• Power Platform or GenAI orchestration experience

If you have the relevant skills and experience, please apply promptly to be considered.

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