Sr. AI Engineer

Cynosure, LLC•Westford, MA

1d•$150,000 - $190,000

About The Position

The Sr. AI Engineer (Forward Deployed) is a software engineer and technical consultant who works directly with business teams to solve high-value problems in their operating environments. Embedded with functional stakeholders, this role translates ambiguous needs into working AI and automation solutions and guides opportunities from discovery and business-case development through prototyping, integration, governed production deployment, adoption, and value realization. The role ensures technology capabilities produce measurable business outcomes. The initial focus is activating and extending capabilities in Microsoft’s enterprise AI and automation ecosystem, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, Copilot agents, Copilot Studio, and Power Automate. The role will also deliver purpose-built solutions integrated with enterprise applications and, as the organization’s AI maturity grows, support advanced use cases involving AI engineering, systems integration, data, application development, and agentic solutions. Success requires curiosity, consulting and facilitation skills, technical credibility, a bias for action, and a commitment to responsible AI. The position partners with business and technical stakeholders to identify, assess, design, build, deploy, support, and measure AI and automation solutions. It collaborates with Information Systems, Information Security, Legal, Privacy, Data, and business process owners to meet enterprise architecture, responsible AI, data protection, and access-control requirements. The role also enables users through training and guidance, supports adoption and production readiness, and recommends whether to extend existing platforms, buy solutions, build custom capabilities, or engage external partners. International travel may be required, up to 15% of the time.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, Engineering, or a closely related technical field.
Five or more years of relevant experience in software engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, solutions architecture, or a related field.
Hands-on delivery experience with AI, data, integration, low-code, or automation solutions.
Experience working directly with business stakeholders from discovery and business-case development through architecture, prototyping, production deployment, adoption, and value measurement.
Hands-on experience with at least one enterprise AI platform.
Exceptional consulting, active-listening, facilitation, and relationship-building skills, including the ability to build trust and shared ownership with business and technical stakeholders.
Business-process analysis and problem-framing skills, including translating ambiguous needs into use cases, requirements, experiments, solution options, delivery plans, and measurable success criteria.
Hands-on knowledge of generative AI, prompt and context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, agents and multi-agent patterns, workflow automation, APIs, integrations, and evaluation methods for grounding, accuracy, reliability, safety, latency, and cost.
Experience building enterprise solutions with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, Copilot Studio, Power Automate, Power Apps, SharePoint, Teams, Microsoft Graph, Dataverse, Azure AI services, or related Microsoft technologies.
Ability to build, test, debug, deploy, and maintain solutions using Python and at least one enterprise application language such as JavaScript, TypeScript, or C#, along with SQL, REST APIs, source control, cloud services, and modern software-development practices.
Ability to design secure, governed integrations between AI agents and enterprise tools, APIs, applications, and data sources, addressing authentication, authorization, identity, permissions, privacy, compliance, responsible AI, and human-in-the-loop controls.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including explaining technical concepts, architectural trade-offs, risks, and recommendations to nontechnical and executive audiences.
Change-management and user-enablement skills, including training, documentation, demonstrations, community engagement, and adoption support.
Outcome orientation and experience defining value hypotheses and measuring adoption, efficiency, quality, risk reduction, reuse, and business impact.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, Azure AI services, or comparable technologies.
Experience evaluating whether to extend, buy, or build solutions.
Experience delivering production AI solutions, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, custom copilots, Azure AI Foundry or Azure OpenAI solutions, data pipelines, and enterprise integrations.
Experience with DevOps and CI/CD practices, observability, automated testing, and secure cloud application development.
Experience designing, deploying, or governing Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
Familiarity with Microsoft Work IQ, Microsoft IQ, or comparable enterprise intelligence, semantic-grounding, and agent-context capabilities.

Responsibilities

Partner with leaders, functional teams, and end users to understand business goals, map workflows, identify pain points, and define AI and automation opportunities.
Facilitate discovery workshops and translate business needs into use cases, requirements, solution options, expected benefits, risks, and success measures.
Assess and prioritize opportunities using a standardized business case covering value, cost, feasibility, data readiness, security, compliance, user impact, risk, time-to-value, scalability, and total cost of ownership.
Design, prototype, code, configure, test, integrate, deploy, and support AI and automation solutions using Microsoft and other appropriate platforms, services, APIs, and software-development frameworks.
Partner with the VP, AI Transformation, Information Systems, business sponsors, and governance stakeholders on feasibility, architecture, effort, dependencies, and delivery risks; support intake, prioritization, benefits tracking, and executive reporting.
Lead assigned solutions autonomously, balance experimentation with enterprise standards, document technical decisions, manage delivery commitments, and escalate material risks or dependencies early.
Develop reusable prompts, agent instructions, workflows, connectors, templates, and solution patterns; maintain documentation and an inventory to support discovery, governance, support, and scaling.
Collaborate with Information Systems, Information Security, Legal, Privacy, Data, and business process owners to meet architecture, responsible AI, data protection, access-control, ownership, human-oversight, production-support, monitoring, and escalation requirements.
Evaluate data, content, integration, and process readiness; design secure connections across enterprise platforms; identify dependencies and recommend remediation or phased delivery.
Build proofs of concept and minimum viable solutions, validate feasibility and business value, gather feedback, iterate, and harden successful pilots for production use with documented architecture, testing, performance, continuity, and support requirements.
Define and track adoption, quality, active usage, time and capacity recaptured, cycle-time reduction, risk, reuse, and business-value metrics; communicate outcomes, limitations, and lessons learned.
Enable users through demonstrations, office hours, documentation, training, community engagement, and practical guidance on AI fundamentals, use cases, prompting, and safe adoption.
Troubleshoot technical and operational issues, coordinate with internal teams and vendors, provide feedback to technology owners, and improve performance, reliability, usability, and maintainability.
Stay current on AI, agentic, automation, and Microsoft platform capabilities; inventory licensed capabilities, evaluate vendor and architecture fit, and recommend whether to extend, buy, build, or engage an external partner.
Embody and live the company values.
Travel internationally as required, up to 15% of the time.