Principal Engineer – Foundry Administrator

Job Title:

Principal Engineer I – Foundry Administrator

Block 23

Principal Engineer I partners closely with Enterprise Architecture, Cloud Engineering, Application Engineering, Security, and business stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable AI capabilities across the enterprise. This role is responsible for the strategy, architecture, governance, administration, and operational support of the enterprise AI Gateway platform built on Azure API Management (APIM), as well as Microsoft Foundry and related AI platform services.

Responsibilities include enabling secure consumption of AI services, agents, large language models (LLMs), and MCP servers; exposing internal APIs, tools, and enterprise capabilities to AI agents and copilots; establishing API standards, governance frameworks, access controls, and AI usage policies; and ensuring platform availability, performance, security, compliance, cost optimization, and operational excellence. As a technical leader and subject matter expert, this position provides architectural direction, drives complex solution designs, develops technical standards and operational procedures, facilitates cross-functional collaboration, and effectively communicates technical strategies, risks, and business value to both technical teams and executive leadership.

• Develop and maintain platform standards, reusable integration patterns, API policies, security controls, and governance frameworks that enable business and technology teams to consume AI services safely and efficiently.
• Design and implement observability, monitoring, logging, and usage analytics solutions for AI workloads, APIs, agents, copilots, and model endpoints to ensure operational excellence and compliance.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture to implement data protection, model governance, and responsible AI controls across the platform ecosystem.
• Lead platform administration activities including environment provisioning, capacity planning, service reliability, configuration management, incident response, and performance optimization, for Azure AI and Foundry services.
• Establish engineering best practices for AI workload lifecycle management, model deployment, API publishing, developer onboarding, and platform automation.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, models, and platform capabilities, providing technical recommendations and implementation guidance to support enterprise AI adoption and innovation initiatives.
• Acting as the technical lead, review plans developed by other engineers & analysts, incorporate them into solution designs that are aligned with architectural principles & business objectives, and delegate implementation across the team.

• 8+ years of experience administering Azure API Management (APIM), including API lifecycle management, security policies, traffic governance, and enterprise integration patterns is required.
• Bachelor's degree in related field required;
  Masters or MBA in related field preferred.
• Previous leadership experience preferred.
• Knowledge of API security, OAuth, OpenID Connect, Managed Identities, Azure RBAC, network security, and enterprise authentication and authorization frameworks is required.
• Experience in programming languages (e.g. C#, Java, JavaScript/Type Script or Python) is required.
• Experience with Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI Services, Azure OpenAI, AI Gateway technologies, or enterprise AI platform administration is preferred.
• Experience deploying and managing MCP servers is preferred.
• Knowledge of AI model selection, token utilization, credit-based consumption, capacity planning, and cost-optimization strategies for forecasting the long-term cost of enterprise AI workloads is preferred.
• Advanced to expert…