Cloud Solution Architect - Azure Infra

With over 18,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft’s end-to-end customer experience. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers come to us not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, but also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience.

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.

We are looking for a highly motivated and skilled Azure Infrastructure Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) Infrastructure to join our International Customer Success Unit. This pivotal role is customer-facing and encompasses a broad range of responsibilities, including the design, build, and maintenance of Azure applications, with a key emphasis on problem-solving to overcome technical barriers and drive customer adoption.

You will own the Azure Infrastructure technical customer engagements including architectural design sessions, specific implementation projects and/or MVPs. The ideal candidate will have experience in customer-facing roles and success leading deep technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, IT Management and Developers to drive Azure based solutions to production.

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home.

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.

The core priorities and Measures Of Success (MoS) for the CSA role include:

1. Technical Expertise: Proficiency in Microsoft’s cloud technologies, especially Azure’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), Well-Architected Framework (WAF), and Azure Landing Zones.
2. Customer Engagement: Ability to engage with customers to understand their technical requirements and business goals, and to align Microsoft’s technologies with their needs.
3. Solution Design: Skills in designing scalable, secure, and resilient cloud solutions that meet customer requirements.
4. Thought Leadership: Being a thought leader in the cloud space, contributing to internal knowledge sharing, and staying up-to-date with the latest industry trends.
5. Collaboration: Working effectively with cross-functional teams and top collaborators to drive customer success.

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. 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.

Customer Centricity

• Gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving new feedback, insights, and resources across internal teams to add and prioritize. Represents the customer/partner to internal teams (e.g., Engineering) to shape products and services by providing insights across the territory. Advocates for the customer/partner at all opportunities and shares customer success stories with the wider internal team.
• Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects and technical specialists, technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders. Receives and synthesizes data about customer/partner business and technical requirements, addresses them with technical architecture(s), and demonstrates and proves those solutions'' capability and value through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. Contributes to and understands how work aligns with customer success plan and meets customer/partner needs by partnering with the appropriate internal teams and resources to deliver customer outcomes. Supports customer skilling by delivering as a trusted technical advisor to ensure customer readiness by facilitating technical discussions and enabling operational health and cloud readiness. Assesses and transfers knowledge to close customer skill gaps.

Business Impact

• Identifies and anticipates issues and advises customers/partners to operate and optimize performance in accordance with Microsoft best practices. Adapts methodology and applies governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks. Adheres to quality assurance standards and calculates risks while ensuring excellence in the design and/or delivery of solutions. Leverages standard tools to ensure accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.
• Drives customer/partner relationships to anticipate, identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers to accelerate consumption and solution implementations (e.g., by application of technical capabilities). Routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party. Applies broad business and technical knowledge across various architecture or other Microsoft solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints. Shapes and enhances customers'' requirements.
• Understands industry trends and the competitor''s architecture solutions and identifies Microsoft''s strengths over competitive solutions to drive conversations with customers/partners and convince them of solution.

Technical Leadership

• Proactively develops technical and professional learning and development plan in alignment with and support from their manager. Role models effective technical readiness. Acts as a mentor and role model to less experienced colleagues to educate them on technical and non-technical concepts. Participates in development opportunities (e.g., Ready, Build, Ignite).
• Shares ideas, insights, 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 technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with the internal team.

Other

• Embody our culture and values