Senior Azure Cloud Platform/Data Science Engineer
Planning and Decision Systems
Location
Remote with light travel as needed to client sites
Employment Type
Full-time
We are seeking a Senior Data Science Engineer with strong Python and SQL skills, quantitative judgment, and demonstrated strength in Azure. The role combines data science, data engineering, and software development. Practical working proficiency in Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, and Azure Databricks is required, alongside effective use of AI development tools and independent validation of results.
Experience and educationAt least 5 years of relevant professional experience in data science, data engineering, or software engineering, including at least 3 years building, deploying, and supporting workloads in Microsoft Azure. Candidates should demonstrate ownership of deployed solutions and the ability to troubleshoot operational issues.
A bachelor's degree in operations research, business, computer science, data science, information systems, statistics, mathematics, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated professional experience. A master's degree is a plus but is not required. A PhD is not required.
Required platform and technical skills- Microsoft Azure: Strong hands-on capability in data storage and compute, identity and access, secure connectivity, deployment automation, monitoring, troubleshooting, and cost management. Relevant services include ADLS Gen2, Azure SQL, Entra ID, managed identities, Key Vault, and Azure Monitor.
- Power BI: Working proficiency building reports and semantic models, using Power Query and DAX, defining relationships and measures, configuring refresh and row-level security, and reconciling reported metrics to source data.
- Microsoft Fabric: Practical experience with workspaces, OneLake, lakehouses or warehouses, and data pipelines or notebooks. Ability to follow data lineage, manage appropriate access, and diagnose processing or reporting issues.
- Azure Databricks: Working proficiency with notebooks, PySpark or Spark SQL, Delta Lake tables, and scheduled jobs. Ability to investigate failed runs and understand compute configuration, data permissions, and performance tradeoffs.
- Python and SQL: Strong proficiency in data preparation, analysis, reusable components, and backend processing. Ability to read unfamiliar code, explain its behavior, and improve its maintainability.
- Data modeling and integration: Understand analytical data models, schemas, data grain, join cardinality, missing values, time alignment, and traceability across data sources and reports.
- Software delivery: Apply version control, code review, automated testing, and controlled releases. Understand APIs, persistent state, long-running processing, and safe recovery from failures.
Demonstrate agentic development capability with tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. Break work into bounded tasks, provide repository context and constraints, direct coding agents, and iterate through implementation, testing, and debugging. Review generated changes, manage branches and tool permissions, protect sensitive information, and independently verify code and analytical results before release.
Analytical and problem solving skills- Translate ambiguous business questions into measurable analytical problems, with explicit assumptions, objectives, constraints, and success criteria.
- Apply statistical and mathematical reasoning, including weighted metrics, uncertainty, validation design, data leakage, and the distinction between association and causation.
- Assess data completeness, consistency, and suitability before choosing analytical methods. Reconcile inputs, intermediate calculations, and reported outputs.
- Evaluate models and analytical results against meaningful baselines. Distinguish improved model performance from changes in data selection, aggregation, or assumptions.
- Reproduce unexpected behavior, construct small diagnostic examples, and use evidence to distinguish data, modeling, and implementation problems.
- Design reproducible experiments and regression and integration tests. Verify behavior across processing, storage, APIs, and reporting boundaries.
- Diagnose performance and usability issues involving large datasets, long-running tasks, stale results, and failure reporting.
- Explain methods, tradeoffs, uncertainty, and limitations clearly to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
Manufacturing experience and/or experience in the Microsoft partner channel is especially valuable. The following qualifications strengthen a candidate profile; depth in every area is not expected.
- Manufacturing knowledge, such as production planning, bills of material, material requirements planning, scheduling, procurement, or inventory processes.
- Microsoft partner-channel experience in technical consulting, solution architecture, implementation, or integrations, including exposure to Dynamics 365 or other ERP systems.
- Predictive modeling, time-series forecasting, simulation, mathematical optimization, or model deployment and monitoring.
- Infrastructure as code with Bicep or Terraform, CI/CD with Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, and automated environment provisioning.
- FastAPI, React, JavaScript, data visualization, and interactive analytical applications.
- Relevant Microsoft or Databricks certifications. Certifications support, but do not replace, demonstrated practical capability.
Learn unfamiliar business concepts through collaboration with subject-matter experts. Restate proposed methods accurately, identify their assumptions, test their implementation, and question implausible results. Advanced operations research expertise is welcome; strong quantitative foundations and demonstrated learning ability are essential.
Professional expectations- Take ownership of quality, follow issues through to a verified resolution, and communicate progress and blockers clearly.
- Distinguish what the evidence establishes from what remains an assumption, and document decisions so others can reproduce the work.
- Balance analytical rigor with practical delivery, seek feedback early, and recognize when deeper domain or platform expertise is needed.
Skills Required
- 10+ years of hands-on experience in data science, machine learning, AI, advanced analytics, or related technical disciplines
- Experience in technical architecture, lead data scientist, principal data scientist, AI/ML architect, or similar senior-level role
- Strong proficiency in Python for data science, machine learning, deep learning, statistical modeling, and production solutions
- Experience with Spark and large-scale data processing
- Strong experience with Azure data and AI technologies, including Azure Machine Learning
- Experience with Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Microsoft 365 Agents, or similar frameworks
- Hands-on experience with PyTorch for deep learning model development
- Strong foundation in statistics, regression, forecasting, optimization, and machine learning methodology
- Experience developing, deploying, owning, and monitoring production-level machine learning models
- Experience applying time-series and forecasting methods such as ARIMA, TBATS, Temporal Fusion Transformer, or Prophet
- Experience working with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data
- Experience with data lakes, data warehouses, APIs, NoSQL databases, and cloud-native data services
- Ability to translate business needs into technical requirements with clients and technical stakeholders
- Strong communication and storytelling skills for explaining technical concepts to non-technical audiences
- Ability to lead complex client-facing engagements and manage multiple priorities
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work through incomplete systems or ambiguous data challenges
- Experience mentoring, coaching, or managing technical team members
- Willingness to travel approximately 10% as needed
- Master's or Ph.D. in computer science, statistics, applied mathematics, data science, engineering, operations research, or related field
- Academic foundation in statistics, computer science, mathematics, optimization, or research-based analytical methods
- Published research, thesis work, National Academy of Sciences affiliation, or demonstrated research depth
- Experience in manufacturing, supply chain, demand forecasting, inventory optimization, quality analytics, production analytics, or industrial operations
- Experience with cloud-native or ML-native organizations, research-heavy environments, or algorithmic optimization teams
- Experience with C++, GPU acceleration, distributed training, or compute optimization
- Experience configuring Azure compute environments for machine learning performance, scalability, and cost efficiency
- Experience with Databricks, Azure Databricks, or equivalent big data and ML engineering platforms
- Experience with proposal development, solution estimation, technical sales support, or pre-sales activities
- Prior consulting experience in a client-facing technical leadership role
What We Do
Through passion and deep industry expertise, MCA Connect helps manufacturers succeed by unlocking innovation with actionable business insights. We understand manufacturing’s unique culture and challenges because we’ve spent more than 20 years in the industry. Through strategic solutions, innovation, and industry intelligence, we help manufacturers across all sub-industries solve critical issues, modernize operations, and gain a competitive edge. MCA Connect helps clients digitally transform through: Manufacturing Strategy: Expert and curated guidance that delivers actionable insights, a path for continuous improvement, and P&L results. Connected Applications: Global Dynamics 365 enterprise implementations and integrations that enable clients to execute against their strategic roadmap. Modern Platform Management: Proactive support, intelligent insights, and optimization of modern manufacturing platform. Manufacturing Intelligence: A connected enterprise powered by Industry 4.0 capabilities that delivers the wisdom of prediction and prescription. As a ten-time Microsoft Partner of the Year, we excel in empowering manufacturers to transform with the Microsoft Cloud. Microsoft’s full suite of secure cloud solutions unifies modern business applications and industry intelligence, enabling organizations to do more.









