Nextlink is seeking an experienced Platform Engineer to join a client's AI Engineering team in Braine-l'Alleud, Belgium. This is a hybrid role on an initial 4-6 month contract, with a strong possibility of extension.

The client's AI Engineering team is building solutions on top of an internal agentic AI platform on Azure, centered on Azure AI Foundry. The platform spans many parts of the organisation cloud infrastructure, API management, DevOps pipelines, and networking each owned by a different specialist team.

What we're looking for a hands-on platform engineer to be the technical glue across all of it: someone who experiments with new Azure AI capabilities, understands how the pieces fit together, and helps the involved teams converge on solutions that work end to end. You won't be alone in this, you'll work alongside our AI engineers, a project manager, and the specialist teams. Your job is to bring the technical depth and the cross-cutting perspective.

This is not a large-scale infrastructure role. The workloads are internal and modest in size, the challenge here is breadth, integration, and staying ahead of a fast-moving Azure AI ecosystem, not throughput or scale.

What you'll do

Explore and experiment
Continuously evaluate new Azure AI Foundry capabilities, preview features, and related services (agent frameworks, model deployments, tool integrations).
Build proof-of-concepts and reference setups that show how new capabilities fit into our platform.
Recommend what we should adopt, what to wait on, and what to skip — with working evidence, not just slide ware.

Connect and guide

Be the technical bridge between AI Engineering and the Cloud, DevOps, and Integration (APIM) teams, the person who understands enough of each domain to keep everyone speaking the same language.
Translate platform needs into concrete, verifiable requirements: networking (routing, firewall rules, NSGs, private endpoints, DNS), API management policies, CI/CD pipelines, identity and access.
Partner with the project manager to make sure nothing technical falls through the cracks between teams, and help verify that delivered changes work end to end.
Work closely with our AI engineers to understand their day-to-day struggles and figure out how automation or platform improvements can remove them.

Location: Braine-l'Alleud, Belgium,
Hybrid, 2 days/week onsite.
Start ASAP.
Language: English (mandatory); French or Dutch a plus.

Requirements

Required Skills:

Hands on experience with Azure: resource management, identity (Entra ID, managed identities), networking (VNets, NSGs, routing, private endpoints, Private DNS, Azure Firewall).
Experience with Infrastructure-as-code (Bicep or Terraform) and CI/CD (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions).
Genuine curiosity about AI platforms,excited to learn Azure AI Foundry, agent architectures, and the ecosystem around them.
Demonstrated communication skills, with a track record of aligning diverse technical stakeholders from network engineers to APIM specialists to AI engineers.
A structured, curious working style, with a natural interest in understanding how things connect.

Preferred Skills:

Azure API Management (policies, backends, networking modes).
Azure AI services (AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, AI Search) or LLM apps.
Writing architecture documentation or decision records (ADRs).
Scripting (Python, PowerShell, or Bash) for automation and testing.

Platform Engineer - AI & Agentic Platform (Azure)