Job Description

As a Senior Cloud Solution Architects (CSAs), you play a critical role in working with customers to provide deep technical support through solution build and first mile customer engagements such as Proof of Concepts, Architectural Design Sessions (ADS), and Hackathons. The CSAs build relationships with customer technical and development resources, designing and architecting innovative solutions based on Microsoft’s cloud platform and technologies. In this role, you deliver value via a portfolio of service delivery engagements optimized to accelerate customer solution builds and first mile customer wins and stand out as a Technology expert due to your deep technical solutions knowledge. You must be able to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft engineering teams and blackbelts often surfacing product enhancements, providing customers’ feedback and insights that help our engineering teams product roadmap prioritization.

Responsibilities

Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment

• Act as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving new feedback, gaps, blockers, insights, resources, etc. across territories to track, add, and prioritize, using established channels (e.g., UAT/TFT). Represent the customer/partner to internal teams (e.g., Engineering) to shape products and services by providing insights across the territory.
• Adapt= methodology and applies governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks (e.g. Well-Architected Framework, Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, Cloud Adoption Framework). Define customer/partner conditions of success, adheres to quality assurance, and calculates risks while designing and/or delivering solutions.
• Know hyperscale cloud services, open-source technologies, and industry best practices regarding infrastructure and application modernisation.
• Contribute to pilots and proof of concepts for technical solutions to prove the proposed architecture design.

Architecture Design and Deployment

• Leverage and champions an existing architecture approach to achieve Microsoft's commitments to the customer/partner. Propose and develop new solutions to scale across multiple projects/workloads while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios.
• Apply broad technical, industry, and enterprise knowledge to architecture projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints, shaping and enhancing customers' requirements.
• Lead customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture(s) to enable a breadth of highly advanced and complex solutions. Provide thought leadership for technical architecture design, development, and deployment and supports/drives the customer/partner throughout design and/or implementation.
• Anticipate, identify, and remove technical blockers (e.g., changing configurations, sample coding) through regular technical reviews and check ins to accelerate architecture implementations. Anticipates and routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party.

Practice Development

• Connect gaps and patterns across business and technology areas, and drive changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and/or processes that enable solutions to scale across customers. drives sales and consumption, as well as IP re-use and best practice sharing. Develop and contribute to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies.

Trusted Advisor

• Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects and technical decision makers (TDMs). Provides direction to TDMs and builds the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Influences partners in technical and architectural areas.
• Creates and sustains constructive tension and trust with customers/partners by respectfully challenging their decisions and/or areas where they might do more and encouraging them to consider alternative architectures and approaches.

Thought Leadership

• Lead virtual teams around technologies and customer/partner challenges by sharing ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape. Act as a mentor to multiple peers and leads initiatives to improve processes and drive efficiency.
• Participate in external architect community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with internal team. Act a mentor to junior colleagues by educating them on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing best practices. Demonstrate deep industry knowledge and drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences.

Customer Usage

• Lead architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization across multiple applications for the customer, resulting in production deployment application and increased customer business value. Lead initiatives to ensure that the customer's environment and applications are well-architected.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Qualifications Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Infrastructure as Code hands-on experience – public code repo is a plus.
• Cloud Native infrastructure design
• Familiar with DevSecOps model
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure) and/or Security (e.g., CCSP (Certified Cloud Security Professional))

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes)
• Open-source participation

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.