Cloud Solution Architect – Application Innovation and Development

We are looking for an Cloud Solution Architect - Application Innovation and Development to join the Customer Success Americas Team within the Customer Success Unit (CSU).  As part of this role, you will be responsible for technical customer engagements, working with the most challenging and exciting projects within Microsoft Azure developer community and growing requests for artificial intelligence (Azure Open AI) projects in a multi-cloud environment. This customer-facing position is a hands-on technical role spanning across design, build, and operations with a focus on meeting customers strategic business plans and Azure adoption challenges. You will work with select customers to lead deep technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, Information Technology (IT) Management and Developers. You will collaborate with a variety of internal and external teams to develop pilots and oversee implementation projects, and increase on adoption. You will drive technical intensity and create communities within customers. And you will collaborate with Product engineering to share feedback into the development of Microsoft products and help develop Azure platforms.

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With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Success Unit (CSU) organization is responsible for the delivery of Enterprise and small/mid market customers across the Americas Region and across industries and regions to accelerate customer value and Azure growth. Our team, the Americas Cloud Solution Architect team, incubates prioritized technology scenarios and develops field capabilities to enable broad customer adoption.​

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. Growth mindset encourages each of us to lean in and learn what matters most to our customers, to create the foundational knowledge that enables us to make customer-first decisions in everything we do. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us achieve our mission.

To learn more about Microsoft’s mission, please visit: https://careers.microsoft.com/mission-culture ​
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Check out all of our products at: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us 
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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 consulting

o OR equivalent experience.

• 4+ years of experience in consultative/complex technical sales and deployment projects, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of highly distributed applications.
• Experience and understanding of large-scale application portfolios in enterprise-wide environments including migration of on-premises workloads to the cloud.
• Team development experience using agile software development methodologies (Agile, SCRUM, SAFe) with proficiency in writing code for demos and Proof of Concept (POCs).
• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and/or hybrid infrastructures, modern architecture, detailed designs, legacy modernization, phased adoption, and technology management.

Preferred Qualificaitons

• Experience with cloud development platforms.  
• Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs.  
• Hands-on experience with modern web and distributed application technologies, modern software architecture and practices, with deep experience in one or more of the following programming languages: C++, C#, Java/Spring, Node.js, PHP, LAMP, Python, Ruby, RUST, GoLang, .NET, SQL, NoSQL, other relational/no-document databases.

5+ years of professional development experience with experience in 4 or more of the following: ​

• Domain expertise in modern cloud design patterns around data management, messaging, observability, reliability, resiliency, performance, identity & security, and invocation.
• Experience using integrated development environments (e.g. Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, XCode, WebSphere) targeting Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, public clouds (i.e. Azure, AWS, Google).​
• Experience with modern development stacks, frameworks, and runtimes: ASP.NET Core, Express, Django, Spring Boot, Azure App Services, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine, Azure Functions, AWS Lambda, gRPC, OAuth/OpenID, or equivalents.
• Experience with containers and scalable orchestration platforms (e.g. Docker, K8s, Azure Kubernetes Service, Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, RedHat OpenShift).
• Experience with DevSecOps toolchains (e.g. Git/GitHub, Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure DevOps, Chef).​
• Experience with application data stacks: Blobs, S3 buckets, Azure SQL DB, MySQL, CosmosDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, or equivalents.
• Experience with integration platforms: Azure Logic Apps, API Management, Service Bus, Queues, Mulesoft, Rabbit MQ, Biztalk, or equivalents.
• Cross-cloud. Familiarity with developing solutions in Office 365 (SharePoint, Teams, etc.), Dynamics 365, Microsoft PowerPlatform, and/or Azure Active Directory.

Experience in some of these development languages:  C#, RUST, GoLang, Python, .NET, SQL, NoSQL, other relational/no-document databases, Java, C++, LAMP. You have a broad understanding and experience with DevOps, GitHub, Kubernetes, Serverless, Enterprise Integration, Intelligent Apps. You should be well versed in AI technologies.

Experience and certification in one of the following technology areas:

• SQL/NoSQL data services and caches (i.e. Azure SQL DB, MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB, RDS, ElasticSearch derivatives, Azure CosmosDB, Redis, or equivalents)

• Azure Synapse, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Hadoop/Spark distributions and related data architectures

• Qlik, Tableau, PowerBI, or equivalents.

• SparkML, Azure ML, Tensorflow, Google Cloud AI, or equivalents.

• • Kafka, Azure Event Hubs, Stream Analytics or equivalents
  • Modern Databases
  • Modern Big Data solutions
  • Modern BI tools
  • Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence
  • IoT/Edge computing with high-volume, near-real-time ingestion/streaming systems

Cloud Solution Architecture IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $103,800 - $200,300 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 $133,700 - $219,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay   

Microsoft will accept applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis.

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.

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Understand customers' overall applications portfolio, IT and business priorities and success measures to design modern cloud architectures and solutions (Microsoft and 3rd party solutions) using various combinations of microservices, cloud native and serverless deployments, DevSecOps, & advanced cloud design patterns to accelerate customer business objectives.​

• Apply technical knowledge and customer insights to create a modernization roadmap. Architect solutions to meet business and IT needs, ensuring technical viability of new projects and successful deployments, while orchestrating key resources and infusing key modernization practices and technologies (e.g. distributed systems design, resiliency and self-healing, observability, etc.), and application development and DevSecOps technologies (e.g. containers and orchestration platforms, serverless, cloud native deployments, etc.) as appropriate​.
• Ensure all solutions exhibit high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, and appropriate reusability and reliability upon deployment​.
• Develop relationships with key customer Application and business decision makers, who drive long-term application modernization in the cloud within their company to enable them to be modern, cloud business solution builders for their constituents. Be the voice of the customer to Microsoft field and engineering groups, share insights and best practices in a Modern Cloud Development community, and connect with Engineering teams to remove key blockers​ for current and future customer deployments.
• Assess the Customers' knowledge of Azure platform and overall cloud readiness to support customers through a structured learning plan and ensure its delivery through partners. Collaborate with other Cloud Solution Architects in developing complex end-to-end Enterprise solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform​.
• Maintain technical skills and knowledge of market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the technical community. Be an Azure Platform evangelist with customers, partners, and external communities.

This is a customer facing role, owning the overall technical relationship between the customer and the Microsoft Azure Platform and customer applications. You will own Cloud Application Development for technical customer engagements including architectural design sessions, developing samples and other hands-on code artifacts in a code-with customer arrangement, and/or provide deep technical guidance in support of production pilots.​

Relationship Building. Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with senior executives, business owners, and decision makers in Enterprise and mid-market environments. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects.

Problem Solving. Ability to solve customer problems through a variety of cloud technologies. 

Collaboration and Communication. Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills. 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 (Executives, IT/business management, Enterprise architects, Application owners, developers, and operators). 

Other

• Embody our culture and values