Cloud Solution Architect

Overview

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft's products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers' expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft's portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

The Global Customer Success (GCS) organization, an organization within CE&S, is leading the effort to enable customer success on the Microsoft Cloud by harnessing leading, AI-powered capabilities and human expertise to deliver innovation solutions that accelerate business value, drive operational excellence and nurture long term loyalty.

We are looking to hire a hands-on Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) to join our diverse, talented, high performance, and innovative team, focused on driving Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations via the Cloud Accelerate Factory. The Cloud Acceleration Factory is best suited for individuals that are highly technical, solution focused and have a passion for Project Management. The Cloud Acceleration Factory provides opportunity to drive feedback into Microsoft's core product teams to help improve our platform.

CSAs are senior individual contributors who operate globally and engage directly with customers. It is a hands-on technical and governance role spanning across design, build, and production. Candidates are expected to comfortably switch from a whiteboard to the keyboard. This is a truly exciting role that will feature unique and challenging technical problems to solve and to help our customers succeed.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

Customer-Centric Approach:

• Play a pivotal role in the Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations Factory, providing technical enablement, operational support, and strategic engagement across customer projects. This role is designed to ensure successful delivery of AI solutions, troubleshoot complex issues, and support innovation through pilot evaluations and advanced use case development. Understand customers' overall data estate, business priorities, and IT success measures. Innovate with AI solutions that drive business value.
• Facilitate scalable delivery through strong technical program management utilizing a factory model/approach, driving program awareness and demand across the regional operating units. Attend in-flight project status meetings to monitor progress and identify support needs. Engage directly with complex or non-standard customer use cases beyond existing accelerators. Participate in intake reviews for milestone sizing, objection handling, and technical scoping.
• Ensure Solution Excellence: Deliver solutions with high performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, reusability, and reliability upon deployment. Gather insights from customers and partners.

Business Impact:

• Drive Consumption Growth: Develop opportunities to enhance Customer Success and help customers extract value from their Microsoft investments.
• Operational Awareness: Understanding of consumption metrics and their reflection on program effectiveness. Ability to collaborate with local teams for nominations and intake support.
• Unblock Customer Challenges: Leverage subject matter expertise to identify resolutions for customer blockers. Follow best practices and utilize repeatable IP.
• Identify and contribute repeatable IP and assets that create velocity in deployment and drives customer value from their Unified investment. Continuously look to improve upon these assets utilizing the best of field inputs. Evaluate pilot opportunities for potential integration into existing offerings.
• Architect Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations Solutions: Apply technical knowledge to design solutions aligned with business and IT needs. Create Innovate with Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations roadmaps, lead POCs and MVPs, and ensure long-term technical viability.

Technical Leadership:

• Advocate for Customers: Share insights and best practices, collaborate with the Factory team to address key blockers, and influence improvements, roadmap and feature prioritization.
• Resolve technical blockers: Debug technical issues and provide fixes for engagements encountering blockers.
• Continuous Learning: Stay updated on market trends, collaborate with the Analytics & AI technical community, and educate customers about the Azure AI platform.
• Accelerate Outcomes: Through engaging with field teams, share expertise, drive factory pipeline, and promote Factory to accelerate customer success, as well as collate feedback upon execution to drive improvement and leverage field teams inputs.

Other

Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business or related field AND 4+ years' experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or Business Applications consulting OR equivalent experience.

Other Qualifications:

• Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role's job duties.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 8+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 6+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• 4+ years experience working on technical projects.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).
• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge in foundational security, foundational AI, architecture design, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise in one or more of the following:
  Deep Domain Expertise in Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations Areas: Domain expertise in one of the Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations specific areas OR hands-on experience working with the respective products at the expert level.
• Networking Expertise: Designing complex global networking solutions in Azure and hybrid connectivity. Requires a deep understanding of Hub & Spoke, vWAN, DNS, BGP, SD-WAN, Express Route, NVA's, Firewall, Private Link
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Deployment: Understanding of Bicep, Terraform, or Azure Resource Manager and familiarity with configuration and deployment of IaC templates in a secure environment.
• Programming Languages and Integration: Knowledge with Python, C#, R, JavaScript, or similar programming languages in the context of application development, and ability to integrate Azure AI with other services (e.g., Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps, Docker, API Management). Also, enterprise-scale technical experience and depth with one or more areas of the Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application Migrations (Azure core technologies including Apps, compute, networking, storage, and databases, along with identity, security, and monitoring services for cloud solutions.)
• Architecting Enterprise-Grade Solutions: The ability to create and explain 3-tier architecture diagrams, system context diagrams, system interaction diagrams, etc. Proven experience building enterprise-grade, Azure Infrastructure and Azure Application -focused solutions on the cloud (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform) for customers, from Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) leading to production deployments.
• Competitive Landscape: Understanding the competitive landscape is valuable, candidates should be aware of key AI platforms beyond Azure, such as AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

Cloud Solution Architecture IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $106,400 - $203,600 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $137,600 - $222,600 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:


This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.