Forward Deployed Technical Lead (AI / Azure)

Svitla Systems Inc. is looking for a Forward Deployed Technical Lead (AI / Azure) for a full-time position (40 hours per week) in LATAM. Our client is an established, third-generation family business with more than 80 years of history in wholesale protein distribution across the Pacific Northwest. Known for rigorous food-safety standards and a customer-first culture.

As a Forward Deployed Technical Lead, you will serve as the pod’s hands-on architect. You will design and deliver every capability increment inside the client’s Azure tenancy, working side by side with the client’s engineers and business users and leading the specialists who rotate through the pod. You will ensure that each AI workflow reaches production with identity, audit, approval, and evaluation controls in place, and that shared foundations (the semantic layer, the governance and access foundation, and the document extraction service) are reused across workflows.

Time zone: U.S. Pacific Time (PT).

Requirements

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years as a hands-on architect or tech lead.
• Experience building and shipping LLM-based applications or agents to production, including tool calling, evaluation sets, and guardrails.
• Strong experience with Microsoft Azure: App Service or Container Apps, Functions, Azure OpenAI or AI Foundry, storage, and networking.
• Solid skills in Python or TypeScript, SQL, and API integration.
• Experience integrating with ERP, WMS, or EDI systems.
• Security-by-design approach: least privilege, separate agent identities, and audit trails.
• Comfort working directly with client engineers and business users in their environment.
• Excellent English communication skills, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs to executives.
• Leadership mindset with mentoring experience.
• Pragmatic approach to balancing reuse and long-term architecture with monthly delivery.
• Availability during Pacific business hours.

Will be a plus

• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Experience with Semantic Kernel, LangGraph, or similar frameworks.
• Experience with Microsoft Dynamics GP.
• Experience with EDI / SPS Commerce.
• Experience with Document AI.
• Experience with UI automation.

Responsibilities

• Produce the Month 1 architecture and control baseline, designed so that later workflows can reuse it.
• Lead delivery of every capability increment to the Definition of Done: deployed through the pipeline, passing evaluation thresholds, with controls evidenced, documented, and demonstrated.
• Design the semantic layer of governed views over Dynamics GP, Latitude WMS, Pepper, SPS Commerce, Samsara, DocLink, and Adaptive.
• Design the governance and access foundation: MCP tool contracts, action-level audit logging, and the evaluation harness.
• Keep every action that changes a record in GP or a partner system behind human approval.
• Record technical decisions as architecture decision records (ADRs).
• Run bi-weekly show-and-tells of working software.
• Lead, unblock, and review the work of bench specialists.