Cloud Solution Architecture - Azure Infra

With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the mission of the Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers achieve their business outcomes faster with technology that does more.

The Global Customer Success (GCS) organization, an organization within CE&S, is leading the effort to enable customer success on the Microsoft Cloud by harnessing leading, AI-powered capabilities and human expertise to deliver innovation solutions that accelerate business value, drive operational excellence and nurture long term loyalty.

In the Customer Success team, we are looking for people with a passion for delivering customer and partner success. As a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) reporting to the Cloud Solution Architect Manager you will enable partner and their customers to achieve their outcomes, based on their investments in Microsoft technology. Leveraging your leading technical team’s expertise, you will drive the team to ensure customers get value from their Microsoft investments.

In this role you will adapt business models, plans, and solutions to insights. Act as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner across communities to add and prioritize. Leverages and champions an existing architecture approach to achieve agreed commitments to the customer/partner. Demonstrate and prove solutions capability and value. Apply broad technical knowledge across various of architecture solutions to meet requirements and resolve identified constraints. Lead customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture. Identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers and route non-technical issues for removal. Adapt methodology and apply governance to minimize business and technical risks. Generate new ideas for changes and improvements. Develop and expand existing impactful relationships with stakeholders. Respectfully challenge customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalate appropriately. Identify Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to convince customers of solution. Share ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with internal teams using a thorough knowledge of specific Microsoft products and their context in the competitive landscape. Participate in external architect community events and share learnings with the internal team. Lead architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer usage/Azure Consumed Revenue. The CSA drives delivery execution through preparedness, precision delivery, overall utilization, and high customer satisfaction in a cost-efficient manner.

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 100% 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.

Fluent in reading, writing and speaking Japanese PLUS fluent in English as well.
Strong presentation skills
Leader role experience or any seniority required role experience is must to have.

Technical Expertise:
Azure Cloud Solution Architects should be experienced at implementing, automating, and troubleshooting Microsoft Azure Infrastructure solutions.

The Azure Cloud Solution Architect role requires knowledge and experience in a number of the following technologies/areas:
Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) core knowledge:
• Storage
• Network
• Compute
Other technical areas we look for real world demonstrated ability are:
• Azure Governance / Cloud Adoption Framework, Azure Policy, Management Groups, Governance / Compliance as Code
• ARM JSON or Terraform Templates – (Infrastructure as code) Azure CLI and/or PowerShell
• Strong understanding of Windows and/or Linux Operating Systems
• Security concepts for Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft Operating Systems
• Azure Active Directory (AAD) and Azure AD Connect knowledge and experience.
• Strong troubleshooting skills and support experience
• Face-to-face customer engagement skills
• Technical Delivery and Customer facing presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences.
• Must have the ability to take on internal initiatives to create services opportunities, and work in a fast-paced environment while balancing multiple demands, addressing shifting priorities, and maintaining focus.
• Troubleshooting knowledge & skills, Microsoft Certifications qualifications desirable
• Degree qualification or equivalent experience

Skills in the following technologies would be considered desirable and will be a candidate’s differentiator:
• Azure Security Center
• Azure Sentinel
• Microsoft Enterprise Scale Landing Zones (Enterprise Scaffold)
• Knowledge of Azure Monitor, Log Analytics
• Configuration as code, such as Desired State Configuration (DSC)
• Automation / Orchestration knowledge – Azure Automation, Runbooks
• Microsoft Azure Stack Hub / Hybrid Cloud – Connected and/or Disconnected Scenario
• Azure PaaS, Containers, App Services, REST APIs, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Additional qualification required:
• Analytical Problem Solving
• Building Customer/Partner Relationships
• Leadership
• Project Management skill
• Mentor experience for internal engineers
• Value Selling
• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent

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.

We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) to drive Partner Technical support and transformation in our Solutions. You will own the Partner engagements, including architecture, implementation, and production.

The ideal candidate will have experience in customer or partner-facing roles and success in leading in-depth technical architecture discussions with customer executives, Architects, IT Management, and Developers to drive value to our customers and is open to travel to partner site as needed by business.

Key responsibilities include:
• Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment (Insights about Customer/Partner and Industry): Gather customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and map architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Adapt business models, plans, and solutions to insights.
• Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment (Internal Advocacy): Act as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving new feedback, gaps, blockers, insights, resources, etc. across communities to track, add, and prioritize, using established channels (e.g., UAT/TFT).
• Architecture Design and Deployment (Requirements and Constraints): Apply broad technical knowledge across various of architecture solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints. Help to shape and enhance customers' requirements.
• Architecture Design and Deployment (Resolving Blockers): Identify, escalate, and work 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.
• Trusted Advisor (Challenger Mindset): Respectfully challenge customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalate appropriately.
• Trusted Advisor (Competitor Insights/ Differentiated Value Proposition): Understand the competitor's architecture solutions and identify Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to drive conversations with customers/partners and convince them of solution.
• Customer /Partner Usage: Lead architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer business value. Drive efforts to ensure that the customer's environment and applications are well-architected.
• Customer /Partner Satisfaction – Deliver positive Customer /Partner Satisfaction, and become trusted advisors to customers / Partners by leveraging solution area expertise to enable defined Success Plan outcomes.