Azure Integration & AI Platform Architect
HI, I'M AKSHAY
I design API-first, event-driven integration on Azure — and lately, the AI systems that sit on top of it.
- AZ-305
- AZ-204
- AZ-104
- 7 YRS
- AZURE
Introduction
Overview.
I design enterprise integration on Azure — API-first, event-driven systems that connect internal platforms to the outside world without breaking under load. Lately I've been doing the same for AI systems, and most of the hard parts turn out to be the same ones.
Seven years across Accenture, Cognizant, and now Capgemini took me from building interfaces to owning the architecture behind them: requirement analysis, TDA, solution design, and the production behaviour that decides whether a design was actually any good.
The work I'm proudest of is rarely on the happy path. It's the retry policy, the dead-letter route and the idempotent handler that decide whether an integration survives the third party having a bad day — and the instrumentation that tells you which one fired. Most recently that same thinking carried into agentic AI on Azure AI Foundry, where the hard parts turned out to be boundaries and evaluation rather than model choice.
Event-Driven Systems
Agentic AI on Azure
Reliability Engineering
- 100+
- interfaces delivered
- 500K+
- messages per day
- ~30%
- fewer incidents
- ~15%
- lower Azure spend
What I've built
Selected work.
Two engagements and one practice, each written around the decisions rather than the outcome — what was considered, what was chosen, and what that choice cost.
01 Case study
One platform, two countries, 500,000 messages a day
Owning end-to-end integration architecture across 50+ interfaces for clients on opposite sides of the world — and making a new one take a week instead of three.
- 50+
- interfaces owned end to end
- 500K+
- messages per day
- 3 wks → 1 wk
- new-interface delivery
02 Case study
Taking over an estate nobody had documented
An inherited integration estate with undocumented interfaces, manual deployments and recurring failures nobody could explain — and the order of operations that brought it under control.
- ~30%
- fewer recurring incidents
- ~15%
- lower Azure consumption cost
- 30+
- interfaces brought under CI/CD
— Practice
Reliability patterns for enterprise integration
The four patterns that decide whether an integration survives production — what each one costs, and when not to reach for it.
Read case studyCapabilities
What I work with.
Azure Integration
- Logic Apps
- API Management
- Azure Functions
- Service Bus
- Event Grid
- Key Vault
- Azure Cache for Redis
- Azure SQL
- Front Door
- WAF
- On-prem Data Gateway
Integration & B2B
- EDI
- AS2
- XSLT
- Liquid
- REST / JSON
- XML
- OpenAPI
- Event-driven patterns
- API-first design
AI on Azure
- Azure AI Foundry
- Agent Framework
- Multi-agent orchestration
- Tool calling
- Azure OpenAI
- Azure AI Search
- Embeddings
- LLM evaluation
- Prompt-injection guardrails
Architecture & Delivery
- Technical Design Architecture
- High availability
- Fault tolerance
- Solution estimation
- Cost optimisation
- Agile Scrum
DevOps & IaC
- Azure DevOps YAML
- Bicep
- Terraform
- CI/CD automation
- Multi-environment promotion
- Git branching strategy
- pytest
Security & Observability
- Managed Identity
- Microsoft Entra ID / MSAL
- OAuth 2.0
- RBAC
- Data residency
- Application Insights
- Log Analytics
- KQL
Languages
- C# / .NET
- Python
- SQL
What I've done so far
Work Experience.
- CA
Nov 2024 — Present
Senior Consultant
Capgemini
Clients: an Australian construction, property and finance group; a UK passenger transport operator.
- Own end-to-end integration architecture across 50+ interfaces — requirement analysis, TDA, solution design and implementation — for clients in two countries.
- Architected API-first, event-driven integration on Logic Apps, API Management, Functions, Service Bus and Event Grid handling 500K+ messages per day.
- Designed for reliability under partial failure: retry policy, dead-letter handling, circuit breaking and idempotent processing.
- Cut new-interface delivery from ~3 weeks to ~1 week by standardising reusable Logic App, APIM policy and pipeline templates.
- Architected two agentic AI solutions on Azure AI Foundry — both selected for further development beyond the 2026 hackathon. Mentor four junior developers.
- Logic Apps
- API Management
- Azure Functions
- Service Bus
- Event Grid
- Azure AI Foundry
- Azure AI Search
- Bicep
- Azure DevOps
- CO
Aug 2022 — Nov 2024
Associate — Projects
Cognizant
Client: a global 4x4 vehicle manufacturer (UK).
- Took over a struggling integration estate — undocumented interfaces, manual deployments, recurring unexplained failures — and brought it under control.
- Owned delivery of 30+ Azure integration interfaces from design through production handover.
- Cut recurring production incidents by ~30% by redesigning retry and dead-letter handling and instrumenting every failure path with proactive alerting.
- Reduced Azure consumption cost by ~15% through right-sizing, consumption-plan tuning and decommissioning redundant resources.
- Replaced manual portal deployments with Azure DevOps CI/CD across three environments.
- Logic Apps
- Azure Functions
- Service Bus
- Key Vault
- Azure DevOps
- RBAC
- AC
Jun 2019 — Aug 2022
Application Development Analyst
Accenture
Client: a US energy utility.
- Developed and maintained 20+ Azure integration interfaces across a heterogeneous enterprise landscape, progressing from assigned build tasks to owning modules end to end.
- Integrated SAP, Salesforce/Dynamics, on-premises SQL and Oracle, and legacy mainframe and SOAP services with Azure PaaS.
- Handled the message-format translation the landscape demanded — XML, flat-file and JSON across systems with incompatible contracts.
- Supported production deployments on an on-call rotation and wrote the integration runbooks adopted by the support team.
- Logic Apps
- Azure Functions
- On-prem Data Gateway
- SAP
- Salesforce
- SOAP / XML
Certifications & education
Credentials.
- AZ-305 Azure Solutions Architect Expert May 2023
- AZ-204 Azure Developer Associate 2023
- AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate Apr 2022
- PL-900 Power Platform Fundamentals Mar 2022
- SC-900 Security, Compliance and Identity Fundamentals Jul 2021
- AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals Dec 2019
- SFC Scrum Fundamentals Certified May 2021
Education
Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science
Madhav Institute of Technology & Science (MITS) · Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh
2015 — 2019
Languages
- English
- Full professional (C2)
- Hindi
- Native
Honours
-
Capgemini Hackathon 2026
Two agentic AI solutions architected; both selected for further development.
-
Full-Stack Automation Engineer — Accenture
Recognised for deployment and CI/CD automation work. Feb 2021.
Get in touch
Contact.
Open to Azure integration and AI platform architecture work — permanent or contract. If you have an integration estate that needs an owner, or a design you want a second opinion on, email is the fastest way to reach me.