Principal AI Architect, Azure & Agentic Systems Full remote

Principal AI Architect, Azure & Agentic Systems Remote, Canada (anywhere in Canada, home office, occasional travel to clients and partner events)
· Permanent, full-time employee
· Principal level, 8 years
· up to 200 000 CAD base salary plus performance bonus

InCycle Software is hiring a Principal AI Architect in Canada to own the architecture behind a new generation of Azure-native AI and agentic systems for our enterprise clients. You will define how large language models, agent frameworks and Azure services come together into production platforms that hold up under real traffic, real data and real security reviews. This is a hands‑on principal role: you set the technical direction, write the reference implementations the engineering teams build on, and make the calls that keep these systems reliable, secure, observable and affordable.

About InCycle InCycle Software is a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Digital & App Innovation and Data & AI, and a Git Hub Verified Partner. We work with enterprise and mid‑market clients across Canada and the United States on four things:

• cloud strategy and governance,
• application modernization,
• modern engineering and Dev Ops,
• data, analytics and AI, including agentic AI strategy and GenAI solution accelerators built on Azure AI Foundry.

You are the senior technical authority on AI and agentic work across InCycle’s portfolio. On client engagements, you lead the architecture from the first strategy session through the reference implementation and the handover, for platforms built on Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI and the surrounding Azure services, deployed in Canadian regions when data residency requires it. Internally, you own the AI reference architectures, accelerators and standards the rest of the team delivers with, and you decide which parts of a fast‑moving ecosystem InCycle adopts and which it waits out.

A typical engagement runs three to nine months and might be an agentic customer‑service platform for a financial services client, a RAG system over a manufacturer’s engineering documents, a public‑sector assistant that must stay inside Canadian borders, or an evaluation and guardrail layer added to an AI product a client already shipped and now cannot trust. You will usually be on one or two engagements at a time, with clients in Canada and, on occasion, the United States.

You are the person the CTO sends into the room when a customer asks whether their agent architecture will survive contact with production. You report to the Practice Lead, Data & AI.

• Design end‑to‑end architecture for Azure‑hosted AI platforms, including single‑agent, multiagent and human‑in‑the‑loop orchestration patterns, and decide when an agent is the right answer and when a plain workflow is.
• Lead solution design on Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI and the Foundry Agent Service, with retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), Azure AI Search and vector indexing as first‑class components rather than bolt‑ons.
• Set the standards for prompt and tool orchestration, function calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, agent memory, evaluation and guardrails, and make them real through templates and reference implementations.
• Architect the services around the models: AKS and Azure Container Apps, Azure Functions, API Management, Event Grid and Service Bus, Cosmos DB and Azure SQL, with identity on Entra  secrets in Key Vault.
• Design for Canadian data residency and sovereignty where clients require it, using Canada Central and Canada East, model availability by region, private endpoints and the governance controls that keep data and inference in country.
• Build the operating layer that most AI projects skip: observability…