Azure Data & AI Architect
First seen by Alion on Sep 10, 2026.
About the Role :
We are looking for a seasoned Azure Data & AI Architect with strong pre-sales solutioning, enterprise architecture, and hands-on delivery leadership experience. The ideal candidate will architect large-scale Azure data platforms and AI/GenAI solutions while working closely with clients, sales, and engineering teams.
What You'll Do :
- Design end-to-end Azure Data & AI architectures across ingestion, storage, transformation, governance, and consumption.
- Define reference architectures using Azure Data Lake, Synapse, Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, Azure SQL & Cosmos DB.
- Architect AI/ML & GenAI solutions using Azure ML, Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI and Cognitive Services.
- Establish data governance, security & compliance using Purview, Unity Catalog and Azure security best practices.
- Create solution blueprints, HLD/LLD and target-state architecture diagrams.
- Lead customer discovery, RFP/RFI solutioning, architecture proposals, estimations and delivery roadmaps.
- Present architectures, PoCs and demos to technical and executive stakeholders.
- Provide hands-on architectural oversight during implementation, ensuring Azure Well-Architected best practices.
- Guide engineering/data science teams on data pipelines, modelling, MLOps and deployment.
- Review code, pipelines and IaC for performance, security, compliance and cost optimization.
- Troubleshoot complex technical challenges and mentor engineers and consultants.
Mandatory Requirements:
- 10+ years overall experience with 8+ years in Azure Data/AI Architecture.
- Proven experience architecting and delivering large-scale Azure data platforms.
- Strong pre-sales experience across customer discovery, RFP/RFI solutioning, proposals, estimation, roadmaps and PoCs.
- Hands-on delivery leadership with experience in architecture governance, data engineering, data science and MLOps.
- Mandatory: Prior experience with a Microsoft Partner organization, including direct contribution to maintaining the Data & AI (Azure) Solutions Partner designation and Microsoft Data & AI specialization audit.
- Strong expertise in Azure Data Lake, Synapse, Microsoft Fabric and/or Databricks.
- Experience with Azure ML, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry and Cognitive Services.
- Strong understanding of ETL/ELT, data modelling and orchestration using ADF/Synapse Pipelines.
- Knowledge of Purview, Azure security, Entra ID, Private Link, Key Vault and RBAC.
- Hands-on experience with Python, SQL and/or Spark, plus Bicep, ARM or Terraform.
- Excellent client-facing communication and executive presentation skills.
Preferred:
- Azure Solutions Architect Expert / Azure Data Engineer Associate / Azure AI Engineer Associate / DP-600.
- Power BI semantic modelling & reporting.
- MLflow, Azure ML Pipelines and ML CI/CD.
- Consulting, SI or Microsoft Solutions Partner experience.
Skills
Azure Architect, Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Azure Data Factory, Synapse Analytics, Azure Databricks, MLOps, Python, Data Engineering, Machine Learning, AI Architecture