Senior Microsoft AI Engineer

We are seeking a skilled Microsoft AI Engineer to join our fully remote startup focused on developing AI-powered business applications, integrations, and automations. This full-time, long-term role involves hands-on implementation, project leadership, and coordination of outsourced specialists. You will manage projects end-to-end—from requirements gathering and solution design to deployment and continuous improvement—across various business processes and products. The role includes ownership of our Microsoft environment, covering Microsoft 365, Azure, and Power Platform, ensuring operational reliability, governance, and cost control. This position offers a startup-aligned salary with significant growth potential and opportunities for career advancement into leadership roles.

Key Responsibilities
- Build and maintain AI assistants and agents using Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry.
- Identify practical opportunities for Microsoft 365 Copilot and support teams in effective adoption.
- Connect AI solutions to business data, tools, and APIs while respecting permissions and data boundaries.
- Develop Power Automate workflows with robust validation, exception handling, monitoring, and recovery.
- Integrate Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, Dataverse, Microsoft Graph, external APIs, and other systems.
- Implement custom connectors or supporting code as required.
- Evaluate AI output quality, failure modes, latency, and operating costs.
- Establish human review and approval steps for critical automated actions.
- Independently administer Microsoft 365, Azure, and Power Platform environments, including user and permission management.
- Configure and manage GitHub-connected Power Platform solutions, including source control and deployment workflows.
- Manage solution lifecycles across development, testing, and production environments.
- Maintain secure application identities, credentials, and access configurations.
- Monitor platform health, investigate failures, maintain documentation, and control licensing and cloud expenses.
- Translate business requirements into clear tasks, milestones, and acceptance criteria.
- Manage project scope, priorities, risks, and stakeholder communications.
- Coordinate outsourced developers, review deliverables, and maintain ownership.
- Mentor colleagues through demonstrations, reviews, and knowledge sharing.
- Ensure solutions are maintainable and aligned with startup budget constraints.

Required Qualifications
- Proven experience delivering production solutions using Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, and Power Automate.
- Practical knowledge of Microsoft 365 Copilot and its application in business workflows.
- Experience building AI agents connected to business data, tools, and APIs.
- Ability to evaluate AI-generated outputs, including managing unreliable or unsupported results.
- Strong expertise in Power Automate cloud flows, connectors, expressions, approvals, and troubleshooting.
- Experience integrating SharePoint, Teams, Dataverse, Microsoft Graph, or similar platforms.
- Working knowledge of Microsoft Entra ID, application permissions, authentication, and credential security.
- Ability to write and review supporting code or scripts in languages such as Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or PowerShell.
- Demonstrated independent administration of Microsoft environments with responsibility for reliability and improvement.
- Hands-on experience with GitHub-connected Power Platform solutions and CI/CD workflows like GitHub Actions.
- Strong understanding of environment separation, solution dependencies, and configuration management.
- Experience in technical project delivery, including planning and stakeholder communication.
- Proven leadership skills in mentoring, coordinating distributed contributors, or leading developers.
- Ability to take ownership of technical challenges, communicate business impact, and deliver verified improvements.
- Self-motivated with clear communication skills and ability to prioritize within a startup budget.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits
- Experience delivering Microsoft AI or automation projects in startup or consulting environments.
- Knowledge of retrieval workflows with permission-aware access to documented knowledge sources.
- Familiarity with Power Apps, Azure services, SQL databases, or Azure DevOps.
- Experience with Azure API Management, including AI gateway features, authentication, monitoring, and cost control.
- Exposure to Azure Key Vault, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and Azure AI Search.
- Ability to build and maintain Power BI reports and dashboards, including data modeling and security.
- Experience linking reporting and analytics to operational workflows and business decisions.
- Skilled in replacing fragile workflows with maintainable, scalable solutions.
- Proven ability to coordinate outsourced implementation while retaining internal technical ownership.
- Effective use of AI development tools with awareness of complexity trade-offs.

This role offers full remote work with a long-term perspective, ownership over AI and automation projects, opportunities to mentor and build a distributed team, and close collaboration with startup leadership. Compensation reflects startup realities with substantial growth potential tied to your contributions. Our remote work setup includes activity tracking and screenshot capture, which will be explained during recruitment. Early applicants are encouraged to apply to discuss how they can help shape our AI and automation practice.