Principal Engineer I – Foundry Administrator

Western Alliance Bank; Phoenix (AZ); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Western Alliance Bank seeks a Principal Engineer I to lead Foundry administration and enterprise AI platform governance. You will oversee Azure API Management, ensure secure AI service consumption, and drive architecture decisions across security, observability, and cost optimization.

Join a technically advanced team responsible for scalable AI capabilities, MCP servers, and platform automation while collaborating with enterprise stakeholders and leadership.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in related field (required).
• 8+ years of Azure API Management administration and governance experience.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical teams.
• Knowledge of API security, OAuth, OpenID Connect, and Azure RBAC.
• Experience with Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI services, or enterprise AI platforms preferred.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain platform standards, policies, and governance for safe AI service consumption.
• Design observability, monitoring, and analytics for AI workloads and APIs.
• Lead platform administration activities: provisioning, capacity planning, incident response, and optimization.
• Provide architectural direction and review plans to align with architectural principles and business goals.
• Evaluate new AI technologies and guide implementation across the enterprise.

Skills

Azure API Management

API security

C#/Java/JS/Python

Microsoft Foundry

Azure AI Services

Leadership

Banking / Financial services domain

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

Microsoft Foundry

Azure OpenAI

Job description

Job Title:

Principal Engineer I – Foundry Administrator

Location:

Block 23

What you’ll do:

Principal Engineer I partners closely with Enterprise Architecture, Cloud Engineering, Application Engineering, Security, and business stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable AI capabilities across the enterprise. This role is responsible for the strategy, architecture, governance, administration, and operational support of the enterprise AI Gateway platform built on Azure API Management (APIM), as well as Microsoft Foundry and related AI platform services. Responsibilities include enabling secure consumption of AI services, agents, large language models (LLMs), and MCP servers; exposing internal APIs, tools, and enterprise capabilities to AI agents and copilots; establishing API standards, governance frameworks, access controls, and AI usage policies; and ensuring platform availability, performance, security, compliance, cost optimization, and operational excellence. As a technical leader and subject matter expert, this position provides architectural direction, drives complex solution designs, develops technical standards and operational procedures, facilitates cross-functional collaboration, and effectively communicates technical strategies, risks, and business value to both technical teams and executive leadership.

• Develop and maintain platform standards, reusable integration patterns, API policies, security controls, and governance frameworks that enable business and technology teams to consume AI services safely and efficiently.
• Design and implement observability, monitoring, logging, and usage analytics solutions for AI workloads, APIs, agents, copilots, and model endpoints to ensure operational excellence and compliance.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture to implement data protection, model governance, and responsible AI controls across the platform ecosystem.
• Lead platform administration activities including environment provisioning, capacity planning, service reliability, configuration management, incident response, and performance optimization, for Azure AI and Foundry services.
• Establish engineering best practices for AI workload lifecycle management, model deployment, API publishing, developer onboarding, and platform automation.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, models, and platform capabilities, providing technical recommendations and implementation guidance to support enterprise AI adoption and innovation initiatives.
• Acting as the technical lead, review plans developed by other engineers & analysts, incorporate them into solution designs that are aligned with architectural principles & business objectives, and delegate implementation across the team.

What you’ll need:

• 8+ years of experience administering Azure API Management (APIM), including API lifecycle management, security policies, traffic governance, and enterprise integration patterns is required.
• Bachelor’s degree in related field required; Masters or MBA in related field preferred.
• Previous leadership experience preferred.
• Knowledge of API security, OAuth, OpenID Connect, Managed Identities, Azure RBAC, network security, and enterprise authentication and authorization frameworks is required.
• Experience in programming languages (e.g. C#, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript or Python) is required.
• Experience with Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI Services, Azure OpenAI, AI Gateway technologies, or enterprise AI platform administration is preferred.
• Experience deploying and managing MCP servers is preferred.
• Knowledge of AI model selection, token utilization, credit-based consumption, capacity planning, and cost-optimization strategies for forecasting the long-term cost of enterprise AI workloads is preferred.
• Advanced to expert knowledge of general Financial Services or Banking is preferred.
• Advanced speaking and writing communication skills.
• Occasional travel may be required.

Benefits you’ll love:

We offer all the important things you’d want — like competitive salaries, an ownership stake in the company, medical and dental insurance, time off, a great 401k matching program, tuition assistance program, an employee volunteer program, and a wellness program. In addition, you’ll have the opportunity to bolster your business knowledge, learning the ins and outs of how successful companies operate and manage their finances, giving you invaluable hands‑on experience to help grow your career!

About the company:

Western Alliance Bank, Member FDIC, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Alliance Bancorporation. Serving clients nationwide, Western Alliance Bank includes six legacy bank brands — Alliance Association Bank, Alliance Bank of Arizona, Bank of Nevada, Bridge Bank, First Independent Bank and Torrey Pines Bank — that remain part of the company’s heritage, as well as AmeriHome Mortgage, a Western Alliance Bank Company.

Western Alliance Bancorporation is committed to equal employment and will consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, sex, color, religion, age, nation origin, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or genetic information. Western Alliance Bancorporation is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process and/or need an alternative method of applying, please email [e-mail] or call 602-386-2488. When contacting us, please provide your contact information and state the nature of your accessibility issue. We will only respond to inquiries concerning requests that involve a reasonable accommodation in the application process.

Western Alliance Bancorporation