Microsoft AI Practice Lead

Role overview: We are seeking a senior AI engineering leader to work across practices and help clients move from AI experimentation to secure, measurable and scalable production solutions. The role will shape engineering strategy, lead complex delivery and connect Azure AI, Copilot, data, application and business-process capabilities into end-to-end solutions. Key responsibilities: - Support executive conversations, origination, proposals, estimation and capability building across practices. - Lead multidisciplinary teams, unblock complex issues and assure technical quality across programmes. - Translate business opportunities into delivery roadmaps, target architectures, prototypes and production implementations. - Lead the architecture and engineering of generative-AI, agentic-AI and machine-learning solutions across multiple client and industry contexts. - Define reusable patterns for retrieval, prompts, tools, agents, evaluation, content safety, observability and human oversight. - Guide integration with enterprise data, APIs, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Dynamics 365 and custom applications. - Establish engineering standards for model lifecycle, security, privacy, responsible AI, testing, release and operational support. Qualifications, skills and experience: - Experience leading cross-functional teams and influencing senior client and technology stakeholders. - Ability to balance strategic leadership with sufficient technical depth to review designs and guide engineering decisions. - Extensive software, data or machine-learning engineering experience, including leadership of enterprise AI delivery. - Hands-on knowledge of Azure AI services, Azure OpenAI, AI Search, Python, APIs and cloud-native architecture. - Strong understanding of retrieval-grounded generation, agent orchestration, model evaluation, safety and responsible-AI controls. Desirable: Copilot Studio, Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, MLflow, Kubernetes, model context protocols, industry-specific AI solutions and advanced Azure AI certifications.