AI Development Lead

Job description

As an Arcadian, you already help us deliver world leading sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy solutions for natural and built assets. You are part of our global business comprising 34,000 people, in over 30 countries, dedicated to improving quality of life. Everyone has an important role to play. With the power of many curious minds, together we can continue to solve the world’s most complex challenges and deliver more impact together. **Role description:** The **AI Developer Lead** is responsible for leading the design, development, and implementation of AI-powered solutions that enhance business operations, employee experiences, and service delivery across Arcadis. This is a technical leadership role that combines hands-on development with solution design, governance, mentoring, and delivery oversight. The role will focus on building enterprise-grade AI agents, copilots, automations, and integrations using technologies such as **Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Copilot Studio, Model Context Protocol (MCP), custom connectors, Power Platform, and Microsoft Azure services**. The AI Developer Lead will work closely with business stakeholders, architects, platform teams, and developers to deliver secure, scalable, and responsible AI solutions that generate measurable business value. **Role accountabilities:** - Lead the design and development of AI-powered solutions, agents, copilots, and automation services that support business and operational outcomes. - Design, build, test, and deploy solutions using Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, and supporting Azure services. - Develop and maintain integrations with enterprise applications using APIs, custom connectors, MCP servers/tools, and event-driven architectures. - Create reusable AI components, templates, and development standards that accelerate delivery across teams. - Partner with solution architects and platform teams to ensure AI solutions align with enterprise standards and technology roadmaps. - Provide technical leadership and guidance for AI development teams and project delivery. - Establish engineering standards, coding practices, testing approaches, and deployment patterns for AI solutions. - Conduct design reviews and provide technical oversight to ensure solution quality, scalability, maintainability, and security. - Ensure AI solutions comply with enterprise security, privacy, legal, and compliance requirements. - Support implementation of responsible AI controls, including transparency, content safety, model governance, and risk mitigation practices. - Collaborate with cybersecurity, data governance, and platform teams to ensure secure data access and integration patterns. Contribute to a collaborative, high-performing engineering culture focused on innovation, continuous improvement, and knowledge sharing. **Qualifications & Experience:** - 5–8+ years of experience in software development, automation, integration, or solution engineering roles. - 2+ years of hands-on experience developing AI, machine learning, generative AI, or intelligent automation solutions. - Experience building solutions using Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Copilot Studio, Microsoft Power Platform, or comparable AI platforms. - Strong experience developing integrations using REST APIs, custom connectors, web services, and enterprise application interfaces. - Experience implementing AI orchestration patterns, prompt engineering techniques, and agent-based solutions. - Understanding of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), vector databases, embeddings, document ingestion, and knowledge grounding approaches. - Experience designing and supporting MCP-based tooling, AI extensions, plugins, or related integration frameworks. - Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, C#, JavaScript, or TypeScript. - Experience working within Agile delivery teams and modern DevOps practices. - Experience with Azure services such as Functions, Logic Apps, API Management, Azure Storage, Cosmos DB, Key Vault, Container Apps, or AKS is nice to have. - Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, and cloud-native application development is nice to have. Continue your career journey as an Arcadian. We can only achieve our goals when everyone is empowered to be their best. We believe everyone's contribution matters. It’s why we are pioneering a skills based approach, where you can harness your unique experience and expertise to carve your career path and maximize the impact we can make together. You do meaningful work, and no matter where your next role in Arcadis takes you, you’ll be helping to deliver sustainable solutions for a more prosperous planet. Make your mark; on your career, your colleagues, your clients, your life and the world around you. Together, we can create a lasting legacy. Our Commitment to Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging We want you to be able to bring your best self to work every day, which is why we take equality and inclusion seriously and hold ourselves to account for our actions. Our ambition is to be an employer of choice and provide a great place to work for all our people.