IMMEDIATE NEED: Microsoft Azure Senior Data & AI Infrastructure Engineer

DESCRIPTION We're a small applied AI lab running a live, production-track AI product for an institutional financial services client. The work is technical, fast-moving, and high-stakes. We need to fill a critical infrastructure role with someone senior, collaborative, and genuinely excited about building in the current AI tooling ecosystem. THE ROLE You'll own the data infrastructure layer for an AI-powered intelligence platform built on the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. This is a hands-on engineering position — you're responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the pipelines that feed a live AI scoring engine. The environment is agentic. Data moves from 15+ heterogeneous external sources (APIs, PDFs, regulatory filings, web) through Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers into a scoring and inference system. The hard problems are extraction quality, schema normalization, pipeline reliability, and getting the right data to the scoring engine in the right shape. You'll work directly with the technical lead and engagement lead. No layers. Fast decisions. WHAT YOU'LL OWN + Data pipeline architecture and delivery across Bronze (raw ingestion), Silver (normalization, NLP extraction, entity resolution), and Gold (unified output, scoring-ready) layers + Microsoft Fabric lakehouse implementation — OneLake, Data Pipelines, Dataflows Gen2, Warehouse, and downstream system integration + Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Studio) — agent orchestration, prompt pipelines, and AI model integration within a secure Azure tenancy + Azure Data Factory orchestration for structured source ingestion +Salesforce integration via Snowflake native connector — field mapping, custom object schemas, sync reliability Extraction pipelines for unstructured sources (PDFs, regulatory filings, web content), coordinating with Azure OpenAI-based extraction agents +Data governance and security posture — all data stays within the client's Azure tenancy; data residency is non-negotiable REQUIRED: Technical Skills + Microsoft Fabric — production experience, not sandbox. You should be able to speak to Lakehouse vs. Warehouse tradeoffs, OneLake architecture, and real pipeline implementation. Microsoft Foundry / Azure AI Studio — hands-on with agent deployments, prompt flow, model endpoints, and Azure OpenAI integration within an enterprise Azure tenancy + Azure Data Factory — pipeline authoring, trigger management, connector configuration, monitoring +Snowflake — Gold layer data warehousing, schema design, query optimization, native connector usage (specifically Salesforce) + Python — data engineering contexts: pandas, PySpark, API clients, extraction scripts + SQL — complex joins, window functions, schema design; SQL Server preferred + Azure Blob Storage / ADLS Gen2 — Parquet/Delta format, access control, lifecycle management REQUIRED: AI-Augmented Development This is a hard requirement. You should be actively using AI coding tools to multiply your output — fluency with Claude Code, Cursor, and OpenAI Codex as part of your daily development workflow. If these aren't already in your stack, this isn't the right fit. We hire for multiplied output, not raw hours. REQUIRED: Demonstrable Work We don't evaluate resumes alone. Bring something — a GitHub repo, a deployed pipeline, an architecture document you authored, a case study with real numbers. We should be able to look at your work and understand what you built, what decisions you made, and why. Work under NDA is fine if you can describe it in enough detail to convey complexity and ownership. ATTITUDE & WORK STYLE Comfortable with Agile Scrum and its accompanying ceremonies. You raise issues early and help solve them. You communicate tradeoffs clearly without over-explaining. You're comfortable with evolving specs and don't need to win the architecture argument — just build the right thing within the approved stack. We're a small, senior team with low friction and direct communication. That's the environment; it works if you work with it. THE STACK The client environment has specific technology approvals. Production work runs on Azure OpenAI (client-hosted), Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Foundry, Snowflake, Azure Data Factory, ADLS Gen2, Salesforce via Snowflake native connector, and SQL Server. LangChain, DeepSeek, and the external Claude API are not approved for this environment. NICE TO HAVES Experience with financial services or institutional investment data (SEC EDGAR, public pension filings, regulatory documents), familiarity with InvestorFlow or Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, unstructured document extraction at scale, or Azure Purview.