Senior Consultant - M365 Search & AI Solutions

Senior Consultant - M365 Search & AI Solutions

Role Overview

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Consultant - M365 Search & AI Solutions to design, develop, and deliver enterprise-grade AI, Copilot Search, enterprise search, integration, web architecture, and business application solutions across Microsoft 365, Azure, SharePoint, Power Platform, and third‑party SaaS platforms.

The ideal candidate will bring strong hands‑on engineering experience combined with technical leadership capabilities across enterprise search, Microsoft Graph Search, Azure AI, Retrieval‑Augmented Generation, Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, Power Platform governance, web application architecture, Dev Ops delivery, and production support.

Please note, this role is not able to offer visa transfer or sponsorship now or in the future.

We believe hybrid work is the way forward as we strive to provide flexibility wherever possible. Based on this role’s business requirements,
this is a hybrid position requiring 2-3 days a week in a client or Cognizant office in Raleigh, NC. Regardless of your working arrangement, we are here to support a healthy work‑life balance though our various wellbeing programs

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of enterprise search and AI-powered knowledge discovery solutions using Azure AI Search, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft 365 content sources, custom connectors, and secure API integrations.
• Design and configure Copilot Search and Microsoft Graph Search experiences, including search verticals, result types, result layouts, refiners, custom connectors, permissions‑aware retrieval, and enterprise search relevance improvements.
• Define and manage enterprise search schemas, including crawled properties, managed properties, metadata mapping, content enrichment, indexing rules, connector configuration, crawl/index scheduling, re‑indexing strategy, and search quality monitoring.
• Design and implement Retrieval‑Augmented Generation solutions that ground AI responses in trusted enterprise content while supporting relevance tuning, semantic search, vector search, hybrid retrieval, access control, and responsible AI guardrails.
• Build scalable agentic AI solutions using Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry, including agent orchestration, tool calling, workflows, knowledge grounding, prompt design, evaluation, and production readiness.
• Develop and review application components using C#, .NET, Python, REST APIs, Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and cloud-native integration patterns.
• Design and support modern web application architecture using ASP.NET, React, REST APIs, layered application patterns, front‑end integration, backend services, authentication, deployment, and maintainability best practices.
• Support server infrastructure and production troubleshooting activities, including IIS configuration, application pool management, load balancing, SSL certificates, request routing, logs, performance bottlenecks, and environment‑level issue resolution.
• Integrate third‑party platforms, enterprise systems, and SaaS applications using secure APIs, middleware, event‑driven patterns, and authentication mechanisms such as OAuth, Microsoft Entra , and certificate‑based authentication.
• Provide technical leadership to onshore and offshore development teams, including sprint planning, code reviews, design reviews, task prioritisation, dependency tracking, and delivery risk management.
• Establish Power Platform governance practices covering environment strategy, DLP policies, connector usage, solution lifecycle management, ALM, security roles, maker standards, and monitoring.
• Design and deliver SharePoint customisation solutions, including modern pages, lists, libraries, metadata models, content types, permissions, SPFx components, custom forms, and integrations with Microsoft 365 services.
• Develop Power Apps and Power Automate solutions to digitise business processes, automate approvals, integrate systems, improve productivity, and enforce governance standards across environments.
• Support AWS service integration where required, including cloud storage, serverless components, API…