Sr. Python Developer - Cloud Platform Engineering

Overview

Insight Global is seeking a Senior Python Developer to build the backend services that power the client's enterprise AI platform. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role on the Platform Engineering team.

The AI platform is organized around platform planes: an AI Control Plane (identity, policy, routing), a Data Plane (governed retrieval and query services), an Observability Plane, and a Developer Plane. Every AI request flows through this platform. You will design and ship Python services that enable gateway and policy enforcement, retrieval and orchestration, event-driven integration between planes, and audit and telemetry surfaces for a compliant, trustworthy platform.

This is a builder role. You will own services end to end — API contracts, implementation, tests, deployment pipelines, and production operation on Azure — and work across service boundaries owned by other teams, requiring clear written communication and disciplined, versioned interfaces.

• Design, build, and operate production Python services (FastAPI/async) across the platform's Control Plane, Data Plane, and Observability Plane, including gateway integration, policy enforcement, retrieval APIs, and service-to-service orchestration.
• Implement and maintain governed API contracts (REST, OpenAPI/schema-first) at plane boundaries with backward-compatible versioning for stable downstream interfaces.
• Build event-driven integration between platform components using Azure messaging services (Event Hubs, Service Bus) for asynchronous, decoupled communication.
• Contribute to the platform's agent execution capabilities — tool-calling services, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and evaluation harnesses that gate AI features before production.
• Enforce the platform's security model in code: managed identities and least-privilege RBAC, Key Vault-backed secrets, private endpoints and network segmentation, and metadata-only logging with no raw payload or PII leakage.
• Own deployment and operations for your services:
  Infrastructure-as-Code (Bicep/Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployment on Azure Container Apps / AKS, and observability instrumentation (Application Insights, Open Telemetry, KQL).
• Own test coverage for critical paths — unit and integration tests (pytest) are a condition of completion, not a follow-up task.
• Document design tradeoffs and coordinate across service boundaries owned by other teams (data engineering, identity, application teams) in writing.

• 5–10 years of professional software development experience, with the majority in Python.
• Strong experience with a modern async Python web framework;
  FastAPI strongly preferred;
  Flask/Django acceptable with a willingness to ramp quickly on FastAPI and async patterns.
• Hands-on production experience with a major public cloud;
  Azure strongly preferred; strong AWS/GCP candidates can transfer but should expect an Azure ramp-up.
• Practical experience with containerized services (Docker) and orchestration on a managed platform (Azure Container Apps, AKS, ECS, Cloud Run, or similar).
• Solid grounding in cloud security fundamentals: IAM (RBAC, managed identities / service principals), secrets management (Key Vault or equivalent), network segmentation (VNets, private endpoints / Private Link), and the principle of least privilege.
• Experience with message/event systems (Event Hubs, Service Bus, Kafka, SQS/SNS, or similar) for asynchronous, decoupled service communication.
• Comfortable working with Infrastructure-as-Code (Bicep, Terraform, or Cloud Formation) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong API design skills (REST, OpenAPI / schema-first contracts) and experience maintaining backward-compatible, versioned APIs across service boundaries.
• Testing discipline: unit and integration testing with pytest or equivalent, and comfort owning test coverage for critical paths.
• Clear written and verbal communication — this role documents tradeoffs and coordinates across service boundaries owned by different teams.
• Experience with Azure AI Search, vector/hybrid search, or embedding pipelines.
• Experience with Azure OpenAI or other LLM/agent-oriented systems —…