Architect, Apps & AI

Job description

**Overview** Microsoft Industry Solutions - Global Center Innovation and Delivery Center (GCID) delivers end-to-end solutions by enabling accelerated adoption and productive use of Microsoft technologies. An organization of well over 1000+ exceptional people, GCID presents a great opportunity for highly skilled services professionals to make a foray into consulting, solution development and delivery roles. The Architect is a senior leader responsible for the successful technical execution and delivery of complex client projects across diverse domains. This role acts as a strategic anchor between clients, senior leadership, delivery managers, project managers, and delivery teams. In the AI-first GCID organization, Architect(s) are expected to embed AI-native thinking into delivery models, ensuring solutions are intelligent, scalable, and aligned with business outcomes. The ideal candidate is passionate about technology, demonstrates breadth of expertise, and advocates for solutions that deliver true client value. **Responsibilities** **AI-First Delivery Leadership** - Embed AI-first principles into delivery workflows, leveraging automation and intelligent orchestration where applicable. - Own the Architecture and drive end-to-end delivery of complex projects, ensuring solutions are scalable, robust, and aligned with client business outcomes. - Drive engineering excellence through reusable components, accelerators, and scalable architecture. - Oversee technical execution across multiple projects, ensuring adherence to best practices, quality standards, and compliance requirements. - Collaborate with clients and internal stakeholders to define strategies, delivery plans, milestones, and risk mitigation approaches. - Act as a technical point of contact for clients, translating business requirements into scalable technical solutions. - Ensure delivery models are optimized for modern, AI-native execution, including integration of automation and intelligent processes. - Ability to step into at‑risk projects, quickly assess issues, and establish a credible path to recovery or exit. **Engineering Excellence** Promote high-quality engineering throughout all projects. Enforce coding standards, architectural integrity, and performance goals. Establish secure coding, TDD, and observability practices. Support ongoing learning and certifications. Advance modern methodologies like Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD for scalable solutions. Build a team culture of technical rigor, innovation, and accountability. **Innovation & Thought Leadership** Track new technologies to guide strategy. Drive innovation in delivery, assets, and tools for better efficiency. Promote best practices and continuous improvement across teams. **Client Engagement & Solutioning** Apply design thinking to develop user-centric solutions that also support business objectives, architecture, and project delivery. Collaborate with clients to identify their needs and provide guidance throughout each stage of the project. Participate in pre-sales and solutioning activities by preparing estimates, proofs-of-concept, and technical proposals. Additionally, maintain strong client relationships to ensure satisfaction and ongoing value. **Team Management & Mentorship** Lead cross-functional teams, promote learning and collaboration, and uphold technical standards. Review work, offer feedback, and support team growth. **Quality & Compliance** Ensure secure, compliant, and reliable solution delivery through secure coding, test‑driven development, observability, design reviews, and quality gates across all engagements. **Qualifications** - 16+ years of experience in software/solution engineering, with at least 8-12 years as Architect and delivery leadership roles. - Proven experience in leading delivery of complex, multi-disciplinary projects. - Strong understanding of modern delivery methodologies (Agile, Scrum, DevOps, etc.). - Excellent communication, stakeholder management, problem-solving, and team leadership skills. - Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience). - Relevant certifications are a plus. **Areas of Expertise** **Full Stack Application Engineering** - - End-to-end design and development of modern web and mobile applications using React, Angular, Next.js, Blazor, or equivalent frameworks - Strong backend expertise using .NET / Java / Node.js / Python, with clean architecture, domain-driven design, and API-first principles - Experience building microservices and distributed systems using REST, gRPC, event-driven patterns, and asynchronous processing - Hands-on expertise with relational and NoSQL databases (Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB) and performance tuning - Strong understanding of state management, scalability, resiliency, and application security **AI Driven Application Development** - Proven expertise in AI‑driven application development, embedding intelligence directly into modern, cloud‑native applications. - Extensive hands‑on experience using GitHub Copilot as a core engineering capability to accelerate solution design, coding, refactoring, testing, and documentation across delivery teams. - Demonstrated ability to foster a Copilot‑assisted engineering culture (“vibe”) - enabling rapid iteration, AI pair‑programming, explain‑as‑you‑build workflows, and high‑velocity delivery without compromising engineering quality. - Strong experience modernizing application landscapes using GitHub Copilot‑assisted approaches, including rapid codebase comprehension, dependency analysis, large‑scale refactoring, and migration to cloud‑native and AI‑enabled architectures. - Effective use of GitHub Copilot across the entire SDLC, from solutioning and scaffolding through CI/CD automation, test generation, production readiness, and operational excellence. - Ability to coach and enable teams and customers on effective Copilot usage patterns, prompt strategies, and safe AI‑assisted engineering practices in enterprise environments. - Apply Responsible AI principles across design and delivery, incorporating security, privacy, governance, and compliance controls into production‑grade engineering workflows. **AI-Enabled Application Development** - Ability to translate business scenarios into production‑grade AI solutions using Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Services, Azure AI Foundry, and custom ML models, with hands‑on delivery of RAG architectures leveraging Azure AI Search, vector databases, enterprise data grounding, and integration patterns. - Strong expertise in prompt engineering, context management, grounding strategies, and LLM integration for copilots, conversational interfaces, intelligent workflows, and decision‑support applications. - Proven experience designing and implementing single‑agent and multi‑agent AI systems, including task boundaries, tool invocation, memory management, collaboration, delegation, and coordination, using frameworks such as Semantic Kernel, LangChain, and LangGraph. - Deep understanding of agentic workflows, combining LLM reasoning with external tools, APIs, and enterprise data sources, alongside agent lifecycle management - planning, execution, retries, failure handling, and human‑in‑the‑loop patterns. - Designs enterprise‑ready AI solutions with built‑in observability and operational excellence, including telemetry, prompt tracing, agent behavior logging, model metrics, experimentation, drift monitoring, and cost/performance optimization, while applying Responsible AI principles across security, privacy, governance, and compliance - balancing speed, quality, and enterprise constraints at scale. **Cloud-Native Architecture (Azure)** - - Deep experience designing cloud‑native, PaaS‑first solutions on Azure, prioritizing managed services over IaaS to improve scalability, resilience, security, and operational efficiency. - Proven expertise in architecting and delivering solutions using Azure App Service, Azure Container Apps, AKS, Azure Functions, and API Management, selecting the right compute model based on workload characteristics and business needs. - Strong working knowledge of identity, security, and networking architectures, including Microsoft Entra ID, RBAC, Managed Identity, Key Vault integration, private endpoints, and VNET‑integrated application deployments. - Design and implementation of architectures that support high availability, horizontal scalability, disaster recovery, and fault tolerance, including multi‑region deployment patterns and resiliency strategies. - Experience in cost‑aware architecture design, applying cost optimization strategies such as right‑sizing, autoscaling, consumption‑based services, and proactive cost governance. - Apply Microsoft Well‑Architected Framework principles across reliability, security, performance efficiency, operational excellence, and cost optimization, incorporating architecture reviews and continuous improvement into delivery. - Hands‑on experience building cloud‑ready landing patterns, integrating application architectures with enterprise networking, security baselines, and platform standards. **DevOps, Platform & Developer Productivity** - - Strong expertise in designing and operating CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions, enabling automated build, test, security scanning, and deployment workflows across environments. - Proven hands‑on experience with Infrastructure‑as‑Code (IaC) using Bicep, ARM, and Terraform, leveraging GitHub Copilot to scaffold modules, generate templates, and propose secure configurations aligned with enterprise standards. - Deep understanding of observability and reliability engineering, including centralized logging, metrics, distributed tracing, SLOs, and proactive alerting for production systems. - Demonstrated ability to enhance developer productivity and delivery velocity through inner‑source practices, reusable components, reference implementations, accelerators, and automation. - Experience embedding DevSecOps practices into delivery pipelines, including secure coding checks, dependency scanning, secrets management, policy enforcement, and compliance validation.