Principal AI Architect, Azure & Agentic Systems Full remote

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 the United States and Canada on four things: cloud strategy and governance, application modernization, modern engineering and Dev Ops, and data, analytics and AI, including agentic AI strategy and GenAI solution accelerators built on Azure AI Foundry.

Our consultants are senior engineers first. They work in small teams on client engagements, often alongside Microsoft, and they are trusted to make technical decisions and see them through to production. We believe there is always a better way to build and deliver software, and we are hired to find it.

Principal AI Architect, Azure & Agentic Systems Remote, United States (anywhere in the U.S., home office, occasional travel to clients and partner events)
· Full-time, W-2
· Principal level, 8+ years
· up to $200,000 base salary plus performance bonus

InCycle Software is hiring a Principal AI Architect 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.

The role 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. 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, or an evaluation and guardrail layer added to an AI product a client already shipped and now cannot trust. 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.

• What you will do 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.
• Build the operating layer that most AI projects skip: observability for LLM calls and agent traces, offline and online evaluation, cost and latency budgets, content safety and responsible-AI governance that would pass an enterprise security review.
• Own the…