AI Azure Consultant (Azure AI Foundry)

A leading global organisation within its sector is seeking a Azure AI Consultant to play a pivotal role in delivering a large-scale enterprise AI transformation programme. This is an exciting opportunity for a highly experienced contractor to join a business investing heavily in next-generation AI capability, helping shape the future of enterprise AI operations within a complex and highly regulated environment. This is an Outside IR35 contract role based in West London. The role will focus on designing and implementing the agentic infrastructure that underpins the next phases of the organisation’s AI roadmap. You will establish Azure AI Foundry as the primary orchestration platform for enterprise AI development and deployment, building scalable and governed AI agent frameworks capable of supporting sophisticated cross-functional business processes. Working across core enterprise systems and Microsoft technologies, you will create secure integrations and tool layers that enable AI agents to interact effectively with business applications, workflows, and operational data. A key component of the role will involve architecting both single-agent and multi-agent orchestration patterns, implementing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines using Azure AI Search, and ensuring all AI solutions are grounded against clean, structured, and governed enterprise content. You will define and implement human-in-the-loop controls, confidence thresholds, escalation mechanisms, and governance checkpoints to ensure AI outputs remain reliable, secure, and fully auditable. You will also lead the implementation of enterprise AI governance and security controls, including Microsoft Purview configuration for data classification, sensitivity labelling, AI asset inventory management, and DLP policy enforcement. Working closely with technology and governance stakeholders, you will ensure strict data boundary controls are maintained across all AI integrations and services, particularly within a shared enterprise tenancy environment where secure segregation of information is critical. Alongside the AI platform and governance responsibilities, you will build and manage secure CI/CD pipelines and deployment frameworks using GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps. All infrastructure and AI environments will be managed through Infrastructure-as-Code using Bicep or Terraform, ensuring deployments remain repeatable, version-controlled, and compliant with enterprise governance standards. The role will also involve implementing automated quality gates, security scanning, model evaluation thresholds, and controlled environment promotion processes across development, staging, and production. As part of the initial delivery programme, you will lead the creation of a production-ready Meeting Intelligence Agent capable of converting Microsoft Teams transcripts into structured recaps, automated Planner tasks, and stakeholder-ready communications. This proof-of-concept will establish the technical and governance blueprint for future AI agent deployments across the organisation. The ideal candidate will bring strong hands-on expertise across Azure AI technologies, enterprise cloud engineering, AI orchestration frameworks, governance tooling, and secure infrastructure delivery. You will be comfortable operating autonomously, engaging with senior stakeholders, and delivering complex AI solutions within demanding timescales. Key technologies within the environment include Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Azure Policy, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Bicep, Terraform, Microsoft Graph API, SharePoint, Salesforce, Oracle Fusion, and enterprise orchestration frameworks such as Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, and Azure AI Agent Service. Candidates should possess proven experience designing and deploying AI agents within Azure environments, alongside strong knowledge of agentic workflows, orchestration patterns, RAG implementations, AI governance, and enterprise security controls. Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure-as-Code, Azure networking, and Microsoft 365 Copilot deployments is essential. Exposure to enterprise API integrations, AI monitoring and drift evaluation, shared tenancy governance models, and regulated industry environments would be highly advantageous, as would Microsoft certifications such as AI-102, AZ-400, or SC-400.