AI Architect

Clear Route is an engineering consultancy bridging Quality Engineering, Cloud Platforms and Developer Experience. We help enterprises reliably bring high-impact digital products to market faster, cheaper, and safer, working with technology leaders facing complex business challenges.

We take as much pride in our people, culture and work-life balance as we do in making better software. We’re not just making better software. We’re making the making of software better. Collaborative, entrepreneurial and dedicated to problem solving, we bring the step change our customer need to sustain innovation. Our values challenge us to do the best we can for Clear Route, our customers and most importantly our team.

This is an opportunity for you to build the organisation from the ground up, use your voice to drive change and help transform organisations and problem domains.

The AI Architect will be working as part of a workstream focused on the underlying Azure platform foundations that the other AI / agentic work streams build on. The team will stand up and harden shared Azure platform capabilities — identity, networking, CI/CD, observability, and environment management — so delivery teams can ship quickly and safely.

• Own the target architecture for an enterprise AI platform already in production:
  Azure-hosted model gateway (APIM / AI Foundry), a custom orchestration harness, MCP servers and sub-agents, and the path to production for agents built by the wider programme.

• Set the architectural direction for one governed route to models that the in-house assistant, Microsoft 365 tooling and potential third-party clients can all use.

• Design integration patterns for enterprise systems of record (HR and service management first) and for the client's data platform, with data classification and UK/EU data residency built in.

• Act as the technical authority for the client's emerging AI Centre of Excellence: reusable patterns, reference architectures and guardrails that business-area teams can adopt.

• Produce and maintain the platform architecture, decision records and roadmap, aligned to a user beta in November and a wider enterprise rollout in early 2027.

• Define the path-to-production standard for agents: environments, evaluation gates, observability, cost controls and release process.

• Design the agent gateway and integration architecture for the first enterprise system (HR) and subsequent systems.

• Set security, identity (Entra), data classification and residency controls in partnership with the client's architecture and security functions.

• Review solution designs from product, labs and forward-deployed engineering teams; unblock delivery and keep them on the platform patterns.

• Python and agent frameworks understanding (Semantic Kernel, Lang Graph, Foundry Agent Service)

• Advise senior client stakeholders (up to CIO level) on platform choices and trade-offs, including build-vs-buy.

• Hand over architecture and patterns to the permanent in-house team as it forms.

• Azure is mandatory: hands-on architecture experience with Azure AI Foundry / Azure OpenAI, API Management as a model gateway, Azure AI Search, Entra  core landing-zone services.

• Proven track record architecting enterprise GenAI and agentic systems in production, not just prototypes: RAG, tool use, multi-agent orchestration, Model Context Protocol (MCP).

• Enterprise integration architecture: APIs, event-driven patterns, identity propagation, integration with SaaS systems of record.

• Strong grasp of AI governance and controls in a regulated environment: data classification, residency, auditability, evaluation and monitoring.

• Able to operate as the senior technical voice on a programme: write clear architecture…