Forward Deployed Engineer Lead

Role Overview

Key Responsibilities

• Translate client priorities and transformation initiatives into practical, commercially viable, enterprise-scale AI solutions.
• Convert business cases and roadmaps into production-ready architectures and delivery plans.
• Own engineering standards covering architecture, testing, evaluation, production readiness, and operational support.
• Evolve AI-native practices including agent-assisted development, automated evaluation, reusable components, observability, and production operations.
• Define reference architectures and decision frameworks for Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, the Avanade Agentic Platform, and Microsoft capabilities.
• Set hiring, assessment, capability-development, career-pathway, and enablement standards for the FDE track.
• Deploy on complex, strategic, at-risk, and reference-critical client mandates.
• Contribute reusable patterns, architectures, assets, and lessons to the platform, product portfolio, and delivery model.

Skills and Experience

• 8+ years in software or AI engineering with senior or lead accountability for production systems.
• Current hands-on agentic engineering experience covering orchestration, retrieval, tool use, evaluation, observability, and failure handling.
• Strong command of the Microsoft AI stack, with credible equivalent experience on another stack considered.
• Experience setting and enforcing engineering standards for a team.
• Experience assessing and hiring engineers at volume and pace.
• Client-facing credibility and experience delivering production solutions.

Ways of Working

• Operate as a player-coach, spending roughly half the time on client builds and half building the track.
• Deploy alongside clients and teams rather than directing work remotely from a studio.
• Help clients determine what should be built, then lead the journey to production.
• Work from a shared pool deployed across tracks, with allocation managed by the Studios Lead.
• Location is flexible across APAC, with regional travel based on demand.

Success Measures