Principal Technical Consultant

What you will do

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.

Azure platform engineering

• 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.
• Plan and execute migrations to Azure: workload assessment and right-sizing with Azure Migrate, migration wave sequencing, cutover runbooks, and post-migration validation across compute, storage, databases, and containers.
• Establish hybrid and cross-premises connectivity: ExpressRoute, VPN gateways, and DNS strategies that connect client on-premises environments to Azure.
• Own cost governance and FinOps practices: budgets and alerts, tagging standards, reserved instance and savings plan strategy, and showback or chargeback reporting.

AI agent platform engineering and delivery

• Design and deploy Microsoft Foundry environments for enterprise clients, including network-isolated configurations behind client firewalls: private endpoints, private DNS, subnet delegation, managed identity and RBAC design, and customer-managed keys.
• Stand up Copilot Studio governance for client tenants: environment strategy and environment groups, DLP baselines and connector governance, generative AI settings, channel approval flows, and licensing and capacity guidance.
• Build promotion pipelines in GitHub Actions that move agents from sandbox to production through automated tests, evaluation thresholds, and human approval gates implemented as environment protection rules.
• Implement evaluation and safety frameworks: golden datasets, quality, retrieval, and safety evaluators run in CI, and compensating controls for model paths where platform content filtering does not apply.
• Develop agents in code with the Foundry SDK (Python) and in Copilot Studio, and establish ALM so agents move between environments by pipeline rather than by hand.
• Advise clients on model selection and placement across the Foundry catalog, including OpenAI and Anthropic models, with data residency, in-region inference, and cost as first-class constraints.

Documentation and enablement

• Author the design documents, as-builts, build guides, technical roadmaps, and runbooks the client operates from after the engagement ends.
• Run workshops, enablement sessions, and office hours for client makers, developers, and administrators.
• Prepare review packages and evidence for client AI governance boards, and keep decision registers current during delivery.