Hiring: Principal Technical Consultant - AI/Cloud Platform Engineering Company: AHEAD Location: United States Job Posted Time: 2026-09-17 09:57:39 Employment Type: Hybrid Target Skills & Keywords : AI, Azure, Azure DevOps, CI/CD, DNS, Foundry, GitHub Actions, IaC, Infrastructure as Code, OIDC, Python, RBAC, Terraform, VPN About the job Experience: •8+ years in engineering or technical consulting, including 5+ years delivering Azure infrastructure, landing zones, or migrations, and at least 18 months delivering GenAI or agent systems to production. Required Skills: •Consulting and delivery leadership •Work directly with client stakeholders to interpret business and operational challenges and translate them into the right technical solution, whether that is an Azure landing zone, a migration wave, or an agentic platform: which platform fits, what data and governance boundaries apply, and what the first production candidate should be. •Lead junior and mid-level consultants on your engagements: set technical direction, review their work, unblock them daily, and develop them into independent delivery owners. •Shape engagements alongside AHEAD account teams: scope workstreams, define deliverables, estimate effort, and keep delivery on plan as client priorities shift. •Build and maintain strong client relationships beyond the current statement of work, and identify opportunities to expand AHEAD's footprint through upsell and cross-sell. •Serve as the senior technical voice in client steering and working sessions, presenting options with tradeoffs and a clear recommendation rather than a menu. •Lead Azure discovery and assessment engagements: current-state architecture reviews, workload and application inventories, dependency mapping, and cloud readiness assessments that inform landing zone and migration roadmaps. •Design and deploy enterprise-scale Azure landing zones aligned to the Cloud Adoption Framework: management group and subscription hierarchies, hub-spoke or Virtual WAN networking, policy-as-code guardrails, and identity and RBAC foundations. Qualifications: •Delivery leadership. You have led small consulting or engineering teams on client work: assigning and reviewing work, mentoring junior consultants, and staying accountable for the engagement outcome, not just your own tasks. •Solution framing. You can take an ambiguous client problem and land it as a concrete architecture, whether that is an Azure landing zone, a migration plan, or an agentic system: pattern, platform choice, data boundaries, and the governance path to production. You know when the right answer is not an agent, and when it is not a rebuild. •Azure landing zone and migration depth. Hands-on delivery of Cloud Adoption Framework landing zones, Azure Migrate-based discovery and migration, hub-spoke or Virtual WAN network design, and workload right-sizing at enterprise scale. •Microsoft Foundry, hands-on. The account and project model, agent development with the current azure-ai-projects Python SDK, versioned agent deployments, model catalog management, and Azure AI Search for retrieval in isolated environments. •Copilot Studio, hands-on. Building agents with generative orchestration, environment administration, DLP and connector governance, agent identity, and solution-based ALM with the pac CLI. •IaC and CI/CD ownership. Infrastructure as code with Terraform, Bicep, or ARM, and GitHub Actions workflows with environments, protection rules, and OIDC federation to Azure. Pipelines and landing zones you built, not ones you used. •Evaluation-driven delivery. You promote agents on evaluation results against a baseline, not on demos, and you can design the dataset and thresholds that make that possible. •Consulting-grade communication. Design documents and technical roadmaps other people can execute, and the ability to explain and defend technical decisions with client executives, security teams, and governance boards. •Microsoft credentials: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305), Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104), Azure DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400), Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer Associate (AI-103), Agentic AI Business Solutions Architect (AB-100), Copilot Studio Applied Skills, or AZ-500. •HashiCorp Terraform Associate certification, and GitHub Actions certification (GH-200). Compensation: •$230,000 - $290,000 / year Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!