Does anyone know what access rights in Azure pulumi needs to function? I am trying it out in a coperate environment and my account has severely limited access - i am trying to work out what is needed minimally - for it to work.

If you are talking about role assignment, you would need Contributor, or a role with a similar permissions to write/read resources. https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/azurerm/guides/service_principal_client_secret.html