Staff Azure AI Platform Engineer

Corporate:

Light & Wonder’s corporate team is comprised of incredible talent that works across the enterprise, defying boundaries to provide essential services in an extraordinary manner to ensure the success of the organization and the well-being of employees.

Position Summary

About the Team

We are building a tight-knit, senior engineering group based in Austin, TX, tasked with creating the next generation of enterprise automation at Light & Wonder. Our mission is to design, deliver, and scale production-grade Agentic AI workflows that execute highly complex, meaningful tasks across the business.

We will operate like a high-functioning startup within the enterprise: we favor shipping over process, rigorous evaluation over opinions, and strategic platform investments that make every subsequent deployment faster. We are leaning heavily into the modern Microsoft ecosystem, anchoring our architecture on the newly GA Microsoft Agent Framework (.NET), Azure OpenAI, and an advanced data backend powered by Snowflake, Databricks, and Microsoft Fabric. If you want to build resilient, multi-agent systems at enterprise scale, this is the team.

About the Role

As our first platform hire, you will be the foundational architect of our deployment, observability, and security posture. We have chosen a deliberately Microsoft-native path. Leveraging .NET Aspire, Azure Functions, and Foundry. You will own the end-to-end operationalization of this stack.

You won't just be maintaining pipelines; you will set the engineering standard for the entire team. You will have deep autonomy to design the CI/CD gates, define our robust evaluation infrastructure, and secure our AI models for sovereign workloads. You are the safeguard ensuring that as we scale our agentic workflows, our platform remains fast, observable, and secure by default.

Essential Job Functions

• Architect and maintain the team's Azure landing zone, ensuring secure, private-network deployments inside the enterprise data boundary

• Design and operate end-to-end CI/CD pipelines for .NET agent workflows and supporting services via Azure DevOps

• Define and manage the evaluation infrastructure, utilizing Foundry Evals and Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Evaluation to establish rigorous, automated deployment gates

• Implement comprehensive observability using Foundry's native MAF tracing and OpenTelemetry multi-agent semantics for distributed cross-agent traces

• Enforce a strict security posture across Entra ID, Key Vault, and private endpoints, including data-classification integration via Purview

• Codify sovereign and hybrid deployment patterns as Infrastructure as Code (Bicep) to enable reliable team self-service

• Drive incident response, establish mature on-call rotations, and provide technical mentorship to platform engineers

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years in DevOps, platform, or infrastructure engineering, with at least 3 years on Azure

• Advanced hands-on with Azure services: AKS, App Service, Functions, API Management, Key Vault, Entra ID, App Insights / Azure Monitor

• Strong IaC fluency (Bicep preferred for Microsoft-native parity; Terraform also acceptable). Production experience designing CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps

• Strong scripting in Python, PowerShell, or Bash; comfortable reading C# and TypeScript

• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, AKS / Kubernetes)

• Experience operating LLM or agent systems in production - serving, evaluation, observability, and cost control

• Working knowledge of enterprise identity (Entra ID / AAD), secret management, private endpoints, and secure-by-default networking

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on with Microsoft Agent Framework, .NET Aspire, and Microsoft Foundry (Observability and/or Evals). MAF is recently GA; depth is uncommon and not required, but signals of fluency with the surrounding Microsoft AI stack are weighted heavily

• Experience with OpenTelemetry, including the multi-agent semantic conventions for distributed agent tracing

• Experience with Foundry Local / Azure Local or other on-prem/sovereign Azure deployment patterns (e.g., Azure / SAIL Sovereign AI Landing Zone)

• Experience with Azure OpenAI capacity planning, PTU management, and cost optimization

• Exposure to SOC2, PCI, or gaming regulatory frameworks.

• Experience designing DLP and data-classification integrations (Purview) for AI systems