AI Engineer ( Azure )

Company Description
CloudGate is a Microsoft Solutions Partner, specializing in cloud, security, data, and AI transformations for organizations across MENA and Africa. Headquartered in Sharjah Media City, with delivery centers in Cairo, Riyadh, Bangalore, and London, we provide comprehensive Microsoft-based solutions, including Azure infrastructure, Microsoft Security, Modern Work tools, Data Analytics, and Managed Services. Our Data & AI practice builds and runs production AI workloads on Azure — from Azure OpenAI and agentic assistants to Microsoft Fabric data platforms — for banking, energy, telco, and large enterprise customers. Recognized with multiple Advanced Specializations and accreditations, we focus on enabling businesses to modernize securely, enhance operational efficiencies, and drive innovation with Microsoft technologies.
Role Description
This is a full-time remote role as an Azure AI Engineer at CloudGate, based in India and reporting to the Chief Technology Officer. This is a builder role: you'll implement the AI solutions our architects design and take them from prototype to production properly. Responsibilities include building AI applications and services on Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry — chat and assistant experiences, summarisation, classification, extraction, and translation workloads; implementing RAG pipelines end to end across ingestion, chunking, embedding, vector and hybrid search in Azure AI Search, re-ranking, and grounded generation; and building agentic solutions with Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, Semantic Kernel, or LangChain, including tool and function calling, orchestration, state, and error handling. You'll build ingestion and document-processing pipelines with Azure Functions, Data Factory, Fabric, and Azure AI Document Intelligence, and integrate with Microsoft 365 and Graph, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, core banking, ERP, and line-of-business APIs. The role also covers evaluation and LLMOps — golden datasets, groundedness and relevance scoring, regression tests, cost and latency instrumentation in Application Insights, and CI/CD with prompt and model versioning in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions — alongside secure deployment with private endpoints, managed identity, Entra ID, and Key Vault, Azure AI Content Safety and prompt-injection defences, and documentation and runbooks clear enough for another engineer to run with.
Qualifications
3–5 years of hands-on software, data, or AI engineering experience, with meaningful recent delivery on Microsoft Azure
Strong Python skills — clean, tested, maintainable code, with comfort across async, REST APIs, and SDK integration
Demonstrable hands-on experience with Azure OpenAI or Azure AI Foundry — deployments, model selection, prompt engineering, and function calling
Practical experience building a RAG solution with Azure AI Search or a comparable vector store — you have shipped one, not just read about it
Working knowledge of at least one orchestration framework (Semantic Kernel, LangChain, or LlamaIndex)
Solid grasp of the Azure services around AI workloads — App Service or Container Apps, Functions, Storage, Key Vault, Networking and Private Endpoints, Entra ID, and Application Insights
Experience with Git-based workflows (branching, pull requests, code reviews) and CI/CD in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
Ability to evaluate AI output objectively — you can explain how you measured quality and what the numbers were
Strong written and spoken English, a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, IT, Engineering, or a related field, and an owner's mindset — you ship what you commit to and flag risks early
Bonus: AI-102 or AZ-204 (DP-100, DP-600, AZ-305, AZ-500 also valued), Copilot Studio or Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility, fine-tuning or evaluation with open-weight models and Azure ML, Docker/AKS/Container Apps with Terraform or Bicep, front-end skills for pilot UIs (React, TypeScript, or Streamlit), and prior delivery to banking, fintech, telco, energy, or public sector customers in MENA or Africa

Work arrangement
No