Principal 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 is leading the effort to create the desired customer experience through support offer creation, driving digital transformation across our tools, and delivering operational excellence across CE&S.

Do you have a passion and interest in partnering with the fastest growing strategic companies, being their technical advocate to ensure they're receiving the highest-level experience available from Microsoft? Support for Mission Critical is looking for deep technical architects, aligned to strategic customers who are undergoing or anticipating hyper-growth. The Principal Cloud Solution Architect will have visibility across all areas of Microsoft to ensure customers achieve maximum value, not only from Azure, but across the entire Microsoft ecosystem (inc. security, M365, etc.). Target customers require deep technical capabilities: resiliency, workload expansion, market leadership through co-innovation, strengthened reliability and security through operational excellence. You'll push customers to realize enhanced reliability, security, performance and capacity, correlating their requests or platform events into actionable recommendations, and emphasizing rapid response, customer advocacy, and deep technical engagement.

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

• Actively listen and empathize with customers to anticipate their needs, advocate for them within Microsoft, and measure success by customer satisfaction and operational excellence.
• Act as a technical leader to drive vision for the team and customers, pilot new models and data usage, scale successful practices and design patterns across the organization, and mentor others to grow their technical capabilities.
• Employ a reliability-first mindset, focused on proactively testing features, simulating failures, integrating chaos engineering, observability, and similar driving perpetual innovation.
• Build and strengthen bridges across Microsoft working seamlessly across teams and cultures, partnering closely with Microsoft Engineering, to communicate complex concepts in clear, actionable terms, fostering an inclusive environment that values diverse perspectives, establishing trusted technical relationships both with customer senior decision-makers (CTOs, product owners) as well as Microsoft stakeholders.
• Define account strategies for target customer portfolios, focused on enterprise scale customers anticipating or going through hyper-growth, aligning business priorities with Customer Success Organization, Sales, and Engineering KPIs.
• Maintain a culture of curiosity, diving beyond typical root-cause analysis to understand decision making and history of circumstances to drive continuous improvement; correlate customer requests or platform events to actionable recommendations with clear accountability by the customer and/or Microsoft.
• Measure success via resiliency targets, adoption metrics, escalation prevention, customer satisfaction, impact avoidance, business outcomes and operational excellence (reliability, security, performance, capacity), highlighting outcome-based results that positively differentiate the value of the team.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 7+ 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 equivalent experience.

Other Requirements

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

Preferred Qualifications:

• Deep Proficiency in cloud/software /ISV/consulting ecosystems.
• Deep technical acumen: level-500 expertise in one Azure domain; broad familiarity with others.
• Knowledge of AI services and Microsoft ecosystem (Security, M365, Dynamics).
• Proven ability to manage complex, highly available services and triage customer escalations
• Exceptional communication and relationship-building skills.
• Software development and AI expertise
• Experience in DevOps and CI/CD
• Advanced degree; PMP or SRE certification.
• Experience launching products or support offers.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire / transfer and every two years thereafter.

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

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

Cloud Solution Architecture IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $130,900 - $251,900 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 $165,600 - $272,300 per year.

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