Forward Deployed Engineer Lead

About the role

The Forward Deployed Engineer Lead sets the standard for how Avanade Next turns business ambition into production reality. As a player-coach for the Forward Deployed Engineer track, the role combines business understanding, solution architecture and engineering leadership to help clients move from opportunity to deployed outcome. It defines the AI-native engineering model for Avanade Next: small expert teams directing agent networks, reusable platforms and assets, and engineering focused on solving business problems. The role also sets the technical standard, capability model and hiring bar for a track expected to grow from 20 engineers at launch to more than 100.

Key responsibilities

• Partner with clients, Industry Reinvention Leads, Domain Architects, Value Architects and Trust Architects to turn business priorities and transformation initiatives into practical AI-enabled solutions.
• Help clients identify where AI creates value, challenge assumptions and shape commercially viable, technically feasible solutions at enterprise scale.
• Convert business cases, reinvention opportunities and roadmaps into production-ready solution architectures and delivery plans.
• Own the engineering standard for the track, including architecture patterns, testing, evaluation, production readiness and operational support.
• Define and evolve AI-native practices such as agent-assisted development, automated evaluation, reusable components, observability and production operations.
• Define reference architectures and decision frameworks for Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, Avanade Agentic Platform and other Microsoft capabilities.
• Set hiring, assessment and capability-development standards, and lead the career pathway and re-skilling of traditional delivery engineers.
• Deploy personally to complex, strategic or reference-critical mandates and work with the AAP Platform Lead, IP & Products Lead and Delivery & Quality Lead.
• Contribute reusable patterns, reference architectures and lessons learned to the Avanade Next platform.

Required profile

• 8+ years in software or AI engineering, with senior or lead accountability for production systems.
• Experience setting and holding an engineering standard, including with people who did not initially agree.
• Experience assessing and hiring engineers at volume and pace, with a defensible bar.
• Client-facing credibility, as the lead is deployed to the client site.
• Ability to build capability where most staff arrive by internal transfer and need re-skilling.

Required skills

• Deep, hands-on agentic engineering: orchestration, retrieval, tool use, evaluation, observability and failure handling.
• Strong command of the Microsoft AI stack; equivalent depth on another stack considered.