Cloud Solution Architect

We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) focusing on Azure App Innovation Services to join the Customer Success Unit. This customer and partner-facing position is a technical role spanning across planning new projects, scoping and narrowing down a technical focus over a general problem space, working with SCRUM/Agile methodologies to design a backlog and also manage a group of partners that will work together with our teams to deliver the desired outcomes.

The immediate team you will be a part of interacts closely with customers, product groups for the respective technologies, global field roles such as Cloud Solution Architects, Customer Engineers, Customer Success Account Managers as well as senior leadership team. This is a highly dynamic, high pace position requiring technical depth, business perception from a customer and partner standpoint, agility and independent decision making while dealing with ambiguity. There are ample opportunities for learning on the job to deepen your technical depth and acquire breadth in a variety of technologies.

**Responsibilities**:
Understanding Customer Technical Environment
- Gathers customer insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer business outcomes. Adapts business models, plans, and solutions to insights.
- Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC) by driving new feedback, gaps, blockers, insights, resources, etc. across communities to track, add, and prioritize, using established channels (e.g., UAT/TFT).
- Manage a group of development partners and match their expertise with the proper customer project and make sure all the best practices for Agile/SCRUM and Well-Architected frameworks are being used in the projects.

Architecture Design and Deployment
- Leverages and champions an existing architecture approach to achieve Microsoft's agreed commitments to the customer. Identifies growth opportunities based on knowledge of customer needs.
- Receives and synthesizes data about customer business and technical requirements, addresses them with technical architecture(s), and demonstrates and proves those solutions capability and business value through design collaboration sessions with the customer.
- Understand which partners are best suited for which customer project and manage the customer-partner connection from earlier stages until project/milestone is finished.
- Identifies, escalates, and works to resolve technical blockers (e.g., changing configurations, sample coding) to accelerate architecture implementations and routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party.
- Respectfully challenges customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalates appropriately.
- Understands the competitor's architecture solutions and identifies Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to drive conversations with customers/partners and convince them of solution.

Thought Leadership
- Shares ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using a thorough knowledge of specific Microsoft products and their context in the competitive landscape.
- Participates in external architect community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with the internal team. Acts a mentor to junior colleagues to educate them on technical and non-technical concepts.

Customer Usage

Other
- Embody our culture and values

**Qualifications**:

- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, 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.

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