Azure AI Consultant

Azure AI Foundry SME Contract: 6-12 months initially, with potential for a longer-term engagement Location: Fully Remote Rate: £450-£500/day Outside IR35 We are looking for an experienced Azure AI Foundry SME / Consultant to support a leading professional services organisation as they embark on the development of their first AI-first application. This is a key role in establishing their Azure AI capability from the ground up, supporting the delivery of the initial application and, crucially, transferring knowledge to their existing permanent engineering team. What We're Looking For You'll ideally have:

• Strong hands-on experience with Azure AI / Microsoft Azure AI Foundry.
• Experience establishing Azure AI Foundry environments or capabilities from scratch, ideally within an enterprise environment.
• Proven experience configuring and deploying LLMs/models within Azure.
• Hands-on experience with AI Agents / agentic AI solutions.
• Strong understanding of Azure AI architecture, security, governance and best practice.
• Experience connecting internal/proprietary business data to LLMs, including RAG, grounding, model customisation and/or fine-tuning.
• The ability to operate as both a hands-on technical SME and trusted advisor.
• Previous experience training, mentoring and upskilling permanent engineering teams Technical capability is important, but communication, mentoring and knowledge transfer are equally critical to this assignment. If you're an Azure AI SME who has genuinely built, implemented and enabled enterprise AI capabilities rather than simply consumed AI APIs, we'd be very interested in speaking with you. Interested in hearing more? Please get in touch with Rebecca Long on 0117 332 8100 / r.long @ ioassociates.co.uk