AI Backend Developer

AI Backend Developer

We are currently recruiting for an AI Backend Developer with Azure AI experience to join one of our Insurance clients on a 6-month contract.

Inside IR35

Remote

Key responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain the Agent Data API (agent state, threads, conversation history, audit and feedback data in Azure Cosmos DB) as a secure, versioned, well-documented service.
• Design, build and maintain the Member Data API as the controlled gateway to the BCUK system of record, including integration, mapping, caching, resilience and rate limiting.
• Model data for Azure Cosmos DB with deliberate partitioning, indexing, consistency and TTL choices, and tune for cost and request-unit efficiency.
• Build the ingestion and indexing pipelines that feed the knowledge base into Azure AI Search from SharePoint, Azure Data Lake and GitHub - extraction, normalisation, chunking, enrichment, embedding generation, incremental refresh and deletion handling.
• Implement authentication and authorisation throughout: Entra managed identities for service-to-service calls, on-behalf-of and delegated permission flows where user context matters, and enforcement of document-level and record-level access so agents can never surface data a user is not entitled to see.
• Expose clean, strongly typed API contracts (OpenAPI) suited to tool calling by agents, with predictable error semantics, idempotency and pagination.
• Engineer for performance and reliability: async patterns, caching, connection management, retries with backoff, circuit breakers, and defined latency budgets that keep agent responses acceptable.
• Write automated unit, integration and contract tests, and support the CI/CD pipeline through to production deployment.

Essential skills and experience

• Strong back-end development experience in C# / .NET and/or Python, building and running RESTful APIs in production.
• Solid Azure application development: App Service, Container Apps or Azure Functions, plus API Management or an equivalent gateway.
• NoSQL and relational data modelling experience, with Azure Cosmos DB (or comparable document database) partitioning and query tuning.
• Systems integration experience - consuming third-party or legacy line-of-business APIs and handling their failure modes, latency and data quality issues.
• Practical implementation of OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect and Microsoft Entra ID authentication, including managed identity and service-to-service auth.
• Observability instrumentation (Application Insights, OpenTelemetry or similar).
• Experience building Azure AI Search indexes, indexers, skillsets or custom enrichment pipelines.
• Experience implementing APIs specifically for LLM tool calling or MCP servers.
• Microsoft Graph / SharePoint Online and Azure Data Lake (ADLS Gen2) integration experience.
• Event-driven architecture with Service Bus, Event Grid or Event Hubs.
• Infrastructure-as-code familiarity (Bicep or Terraform) sufficient to deploy your own services.
• Certifications such as AZ-204 or AI-102.

Guidant, Carbon60, Lorien & SRG - The Impellam Group Portfolio are acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy.