Principal AI Engineer (Azure)

TL;DR

Principal AI Engineer (Azure/AI): Leading the technical direction and architecture of the Student Journey Platform, a multi-component AI system for university partner environments with an accent on real-time orchestration, ML model serving, and multi-tenant Kubernetes architecture. Focus on designing scalable event-driven workflows, ensuring sub-second latency for AI communication endpoints, and establishing enterprise-wide architecture standards.

Location: Remote (US)

Company

hirify.global is an education technology company that provides support and expertise to over 100 universities to help them grow workforce-focused online degree programs.

What you will do

• Lead the architecture and evolution of cloud-native infrastructure for the Student Journey Platform on Azure (AKS), ensuring scalability and reliability.
• Establish and promote architecture standards, design patterns, and deployment best practices for all engineering teams.
• Design and implement resilient asynchronous AI workloads using Kafka, Azure Event Hubs, and Azure Service Bus.
• Partner with Product and Engineering stakeholders to align infrastructure decisions with business growth and adoption curves.
• Represent the platform's technical strategy and present architecture proposals to the Architecture Review Board (ARB).
• Manage multi-tenant cloud infrastructure across university partners with distinct compliance and data isolation requirements.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated progression into architecture ownership.
• Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes (AKS preferred), Docker, and distributed system design at production scale.
• Deep experience with autoscaling policy design, resource governance, and cost management using Infrastructure as Code.
• Proficiency in Python, C#, Java, or a comparable production language with strong OOP fundamentals.
• Experience translating business requirements into infrastructure architecture, capacity planning, and SLA definitions.
• Must be based in the United States.

Nice to have

• Architecture or deployment experience with AI/ML systems in cloud environments.
• Experience with Databricks model serving endpoints and vector stores.
• Implementation experience with Azure AI Foundry and real-time models.
• Familiarity with RAG systems and MCP server architecture.

Culture & Benefits

• Equal-opportunity employer supporting a diverse and inclusive workforce.
• Opportunity to lead the technical direction of a high-impact AI platform in the EdTech space.