Enterprise Architect, Azure (Remote)

About the RoleWe are seeking a seasoned Enterprise Architect, Azure to lead the design, governance, and evolution of our enterprise-wide technology architecture. In this remote contract role, you will be the connective tissue between business strategy and technical execution — defining architectural standards, enabling AI-powered data products, and guiding delivery teams across cloud, data, and AI domains.You will collaborate closely with client and technology stakeholders, develop target-state architectures, create solution blueprints, and drive modernization from legacy systems to scalable, governed, cloud-native platforms on Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365.This is a contract role with State Department. ResponsibilitiesGovernance, Security & Compliance• Implement data governance and access controls using Unity Catalog: RBAC/ABAC, row/column-level security, secrets management, encryption, auditing, and retention• Establish enterprise practices for data contracts, lineage, data quality, and SLAs/SLOs• Partner with Security, Privacy, and Compliance teams to ensure architectures meet applicable regulatory obligations (HIPAA, GxP, FDA, 21 CFR Part 11 where relevant)Delivery Leadership & Stakeholder Engagement• Lead architecture workshops and solutioning sessions with business and technology stakeholders to define prioritized use cases and measurable outcomes• Provide delivery leadership: estimates, risk and dependency management, and executive-ready status reporting• Establish architecture standards, patterns, guardrails, and governance processes to enable consistent, repeatable delivery at scale• Coach and mentor architects and engineering teams; create reusable templates, accelerators, and best practicesDevOps, MLOps & Observability• Establish CI/CD standards for notebooks, jobs, repos, and pipelines; define environment strategy and release trains• Drive Infrastructure-as-Code adoption (Terraform/Bicep) for repeatable infrastructure and policy-as-code• Operationalize the ML lifecycle with MLflow, feature stores, training-serving consistency, and production monitoring• Define monitoring, alerting, and runbooks; lead incident postmortems and drive continuous improvementQualifications• Deep expertise in Microsoft Azure architecture, including security, identity, networking, resiliency, observability, and cost optimization• Proven experience designing AI/ML platforms and deploying production-grade solutions, including agentic AI orchestration and advanced workflow patterns• Strong architecture depth across distributed systems, event-driven integration, APIs, and modern data engineering• Hands-on experience with unstructured data processing at scale: document intelligence/OCR, NLP extraction, semantic search, vector databases, and structured output pipelines• Experience with event streaming and CDC patterns (Kafka/Event Hubs/Kinesis, Debezium) and ELT tooling (including dbt)• Track record of influencing senior stakeholders and driving cross-functional alignment and governance• Familiarity with regulated industries (HIPAA, GxP, FDA, 21 CFR Part 11) is a strong plus• Azure certifications (AZ-305, AZ-104), Security, or relevant AI credentials preferred• Executive-level communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical trade-offs into business terms• Governance and secure-by-design mindset with a strong outcome orientation