Overview
On Site
$140000 - $200000
Full Time
No Travel Required
Skills
AKS
ACI
App Service
Azure Functions
AI
Artificial Intelligence
ML
Machine learning
Semantic Kernal
.NET
OpenAI
Cognitive Services
CI/CD
OpenAI
Cognitive Services
Log Analytics
Prometheus
Grafana
Job Details
Role :: Lead AI Engineer AI Agents (Semantic Kernel)
Location :: Cary, NC
Type :: Fulltime
Job Description:
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years leading high-visibility projects
- Deep expertise in Semantic Kernel for .NET 8+
- Hands-on experience with Azure compute and AI services:
- AKS, ACI, App Service, Azure Functions
- Azure OpenAI Service, Cognitive Search, Cosmos DB or Azure SQL
- Strong containerization skills: Docker, multi-stage builds, image security scanning
- CI/CD pipelines experience (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions) for automated builds and deployments
- Observability and monitoring proficiency:
- Instrumentation with Application Insights / OpenTelemetry
- Log Analytics, Prometheus, Grafana dashboards
- Solid background in RESTful API design, microservices, and event-driven architectures
- Familiarity with security and compliance in cloud environments (Azure Policy, Key Vault, RBAC)
- Excellent communication skills; proven ability to drive technical decisions and mentor teams
Roles & Responsibilities
- Lead design and implementation of AI Agents using Semantic Kernel, orchestrating prompts, skills, memory, and plugins
- Containerize services into Docker images; author and maintain Dockerfiles and multi-stage CI/CD pipelines
- Deploy and manage containerized workloads on Azure
- Integrate with Azure AI services (OpenAI, Cognitive Services) for embedding, completions, and vector stores
- Instrument services for observability on Azure
- Define and enforce best practices for secure configuration, secret management (Azure Key Vault), and identity (Managed Identities)
- Collaborate with data engineers, ML engineers, and architects to integrate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and knowledge bases
Nice to have:
- Experience with vector and/or graph databases
- Prior work on retrieval-augmented generation or custom embedding pipelines
- Knowledge of Terraform for infrastructure as code
- Open source contributions or published Semantic Kernel examples
Employers have access to artificial intelligence language tools (“AI”) that help generate and enhance job descriptions and AI may have been used to create this description. The position description has been reviewed for accuracy and Dice believes it to correctly reflect the job opportunity.