Job Description

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us to achieve our mission.
Are you ready to seize an opportunity to drive leading edge technology solutions with the customer? Do you value deploying and working on the latest solutions with real world impact? Do you thrive by mentoring and leading by example? Would you love to help us accelerate the transformation towards data-driven organizations? Do you want to join an elite and distinguished team?
Microsoft’s Customer Success Unit, CSU, is a customer-focused, technically intense group within Microsoft made up of Architects and Customer Engineers across solution areas of Application Innovation, Infrastructure, Security, Data & AI, Modern Work, and Business Applications. The CSU helps customer realise their full potential through accelerated adoption and productive use of Microsoft technologies.
We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate Azure Cloud Solution Architect to join the Customer Success Unit to lead the well-architected excellence function. This position is a hands-on business and technical role spanning across complex problem-solving and technical process leadership, with a focus on short term problem resolution of capacity triages, and field enablement toward long term capacity management in CSU.
As part of this role, you will:

• Act as an owner and leader for customer architecture and usage scenarios, working with global engineering teams and guiding APAC account teams around Azure technical architecture decision
• Collaborate with global stakeholders across product groups, engineering teams, commercial teams as an APAC technical champion for consumption management
• Drive a culture of proactive customer technical planning for key strategic customers
• Lead and develop initiatives for improving long term customer architectural excellence and management
• Drive stakeholder awareness, champion teams, and best practices around customer cloud architecture

Responsibilities

Key responsibilities include:

• Lead architectural review on a per-customer and per-workload basis to determine triage priority and technical feasibility across VM sizing, networking, performance, and long-term planning
• Apply knowledge and customer insights to develop architectures to meet business and IT needs, and incorporate short term and long-term architectural management and planning best practices
• Create scale in the CSU and other technical communities in APAC by coaching account teams, building reusable technical guidance and artifacts and conducting knowledge sharing sessions
• Develop and improve customer-centricity and efficacy of Microsoft programs for customer planning. Drive effective communications across stakeholders
• Be an advocate and coach for account teams of key strategic customers to maintain a proactive capacity governance with customers, and orchestrate the demand signalling for those key customers and stakeholders
• Ensure all solutions leverage the design and operations guidance according to the Well-Architected framework across all pillars, including performance efficiency, security, operational excellence, reliability, and cost optimization
• Run Architectural Design Sessions to build optimisation plans, resilient architectures supporting multi region solutions
• Be the Voice of the Customer; Share insights and best practices, and connect with Engineering and Business teams to remove blockers

Strategy and Leadership

• Partner with stakeholders to identify root problems (e.g., root-cause analysis), define the program/ process strategy, gather requirements, identify resource needs, create the project plan and targets, and work across teams to align on the plan.
• Work with cross-functional stakeholders to plan, design, execute and manage programs/ processes through the project management cycle and produce collateral to incorporate stakeholder needs and ensure the business objectives are met.
  
• Leverage data and performance metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to demonstrate the value of the program/ process and show business impact.
• Manage the programs/ processes to meet objectives, participates in pilot programs to ensure smooth implementation, and escalates to appropriate stakeholders to remove obstacles.
  
• Lead APAC business reviews for architectural planningt, run regular rhythms to identify best practices and gaps, and make improvements accordingly.

Qualifications

Experience Required: Education, Key Experiences, Skills, and Knowledge:

Professional

• 5+ years of success in consultative/complex technical sales and deployment projects, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of highly distributed applications. Required
• 5+ years of public cloud expertise designing and maintaining data workloads leveraging IaaS and/or PaaS offerings across Azure, AWS or GCP. Required
• Relationship Building. Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with senior IT executives in large or highly strategic accounts. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects. Required
• Problem Solving. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies. Required
• Collaboration and Communication. Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills. Required
• Ability to orchestrate, lead, and influence virtual teams, ensuring successful implementation of customer projects. Presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences (Senior Executives, IT management, Administrators and Developers) Required
• Fluent in English Required

Technical

• 10+ years of related experience in: Senior Technical/Sales/Leadership Roles, Business Transformation, Coaching Solution Sales, Strategic Planning, Strong Business Analysis Skills (understands financials, capacity management processes, scorecards and key performance indicators) Preferred
• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud (preferably Azure or GCP/AWS) and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management Required
• Experience with management of cloud infrastructure solutions (e.g. Windows and Linux IaaS, SAP, VMware, BCDR, Security, Management, Storage, Networking, OSS, containers, HPC, and Infra as a code technologies) Preferred
• Experience and understanding of large-scale application portfolios in enterprise-wide environments (including migration of on-premise workloads to the cloud) Preferred
• Experience with scalable architectures using Azure App Service, API management, serverless technologies, container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry etc.), API management, microservice frameworks, SDKs etc. Preferred
• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud native app hosting through software design, development, deployment and app refactoring/migrations Preferred
• Big Data and Data Warehouses experience including Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly Azure SQL DW), Snowflake, GCP’s Big Query, AWS Redshift Preferred
• Advanced Analytics experience with Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Databricks, Azure HDInsights, Amazon EMR and data visualization tools (i.e. PowerBI, Tableau) Preferred
• Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of cloud development platforms
• Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs Preferred

Education

• 
  Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience, MBA/Masters a plus with focus on business administration, economics, finance, organizational management, business management Preferred
• Certification of a major hyperscale Cloud (e.g. Microsoft Azure AZ-303/304, AWS SA Professional) Preferred
• Certification in one of the following technologies: Cloud, web application development, cloud-native application architecture (e.g. containers, microservices, API management), modern software development techniques like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (e.g. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure developer services, GitHub) and container orchestration systems (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Azure Kubernetes Service, GitHub) Preferred

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.