Senior Azure AI Foundry Engineer

Interon IT Solutions; Detroit (MI); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Cognizant is seeking an experienced Azure AI Foundry Engineer to design and deploy enterprise-grade generative AI solutions on Microsoft Azure. The role requires hands-on work with Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, RAG, AI agents, Python, and cloud-native application development in a hybrid setting in Lansing/Detroit.

You will design pipelines, build AI services and APIs, integrate data sources, implement safety controls, and collaborate with data engineers, architects, and product teams to

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering, data engineering, or AI development.
• Hands-on experience with Azure AI Foundry or Microsoft Foundry.
• Experience with Azure OpenAI models and embeddings.
• Proficiency in Python and REST API development.
• Experience with RAG-based applications and vector stores.
• Familiarity with Azure data services and CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop generative AI applications on Azure AI Foundry.
• Build Retrieval-Augmented Generation solutions with Azure Search and vector databases.
• Develop AI agents, prompt workflows, and tool-calling processes.
• Create backend AI services and APIs using Python frameworks.
• Integrate data from Azure Data Lake, Blob Storage, and SQL/NoSQL stores.
• Implement monitoring, safety, and responsible AI controls.
• Collaborate with data engineers, architects, and product teams.
• Prepare deployment guides and operational documentation.

Skills

Azure AI Foundry

Python

AI/ML development

REST API development

Cloud-native solutions

Tools

Azure OpenAI

Azure Data Lake

Azure Monitor

FastAPI

Flask

GitHub Actions

AKS

Blob Storage

SQL

NoSQL

Job description

Job Title: Azure AI Foundry Engineer

Location: Lansing/Detroit, Michigan (Hybrid)

Client: Cognizant

Employment Type: W2

Experience: 8+ Years

Job Description:

We are seeking an experienced Azure AI Foundry Engineer to design, develop, and deploy enterprise-grade generative AI solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform. The ideal candidate should have strong experience with Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, AI agents, Python, and cloud-native application development.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and develop generative AI applications using Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI.
• Build Retrieval-Augmented Generation solutions using Azure AI Search, vector databases, embeddings, and enterprise data sources.
• Develop AI agents capable of interacting with APIs, databases, documents, and other business systems.
• Design prompt workflows, system instructions, tool-calling processes, and multi-step agent workflows.
• Develop backend AI services and APIs using Python, FastAPI, Flask, or similar frameworks.
• Integrate structured and unstructured data from Azure Data Lake, Blob Storage, SQL databases, SharePoint, and enterprise applications.
• Implement document ingestion, chunking, embedding, indexing, retrieval, and response-generation pipelines.
• Evaluate AI applications for response accuracy, relevance, groundedness, safety, latency, and overall performance.
• Implement responsible AI controls, content filtering, prompt-injection protection, access controls, and data-security standards.
• Monitor AI applications using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, logging, tracing, and Foundry observability capabilities.
• Deploy and manage AI solutions using Azure Functions, Azure App Service, Azure Container Apps, AKS, or similar Azure services.
• Build automated CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
• Collaborate with data engineers, data scientists, architects, business analysts, and product teams.
• Troubleshoot issues related to model responses, data retrieval, integrations, application performance, and cloud deployment.
• Prepare technical design documents, architecture diagrams, deployment guides, and operational documentation.

Required Skills

• 6+ years of overall software engineering, data engineering, cloud, or AI development experience.
• Strong hands-on experience with Azure AI Foundry or Microsoft Foundry.
• Experience with Azure OpenAI models, embeddings, chat completions, and model deployments.
• Strong experience developing RAG-based applications.
• Hands-on experience with Azure AI Search, vector search, semantic search, and hybrid search.
• Strong programming experience with Python.
• Experience developing REST APIs using FastAPI, Flask, or similar frameworks.
• Experience with prompt engineering, function calling, tool calling, and AI agent development.
• Understanding of LLM evaluation, hallucination reduction, groundedness, responsible AI, and content safety.
• Experience with Azure services such as Blob Storage, Data Lake, Key Vault, Functions, App Service, Container Apps, AKS, and Application Insights.
• Experience working with SQL, NoSQL, document databases, or vector databases.
• Experience with Git, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Docker, and CI/CD processes.