Cloud Solution Architect - Infrastructure

We are currently looking for Azure Cloud Solution Architects to join our teams across our various business groups: Enterprise, as well as Regulated Industries and our One Commercial Partner. By applying to this role, you will be considered for multiple opportunities within Microsoft across the United States.

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.

Microsoft aspires to help our customers achieve their own digital transformation, leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud solutions and support offerings. To this end, Microsoft invests in a dedicated Customer Success team that will help Microsoft customers successfully realize their business outcomes.
Azure is the most comprehensive, innovative and flexible cloud platform today and Microsoft is hiring professionals that will drive customer cloud adoption within the most important companies in the market. We are always learning. Insatiably curious. We lean into uncertainty, take risks, and learn quickly from our mistakes. We build on each other’s ideas because we are better together. We stand in awe of what humans dare to achieve and are motivated every day to empower others to do more and achieve more through our technology and innovation. Together we make a difference.ResponsibilitiesThis is a customer facing role, owning the overall technical relationship between the customer and Microsoft Azure Infrastructure and Applications Development Platform. You will own the Cloud Infrastructure and Azure Applications Development technical customer engagements including architectural design sessions, specific implementation projects and/or pilots. The ideal candidate will have experience leading deep technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, IT Management and Developers.

Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment

• Observes colleagues and learns how to gather customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs) and align with solutions.
• Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by learning to identify and share feedback around technical capabilities, gaps, blockers, and insights that relate to the customer/partner with internal teams, using established channels (e.g., UAT/TFT).

Architecture Design and Deployment

• Leverages an existing architecture approach or reference architecture to propose a solution or achieve Microsoft's agreed commitments to the customer/partner. Assesses customer/partner needs and gathers information that helps others to identify growth opportunities.
• Solicits input from others to contribute to proposals for viable solutions based on specific technical products. demonstrates basic technical concepts and proves those design solutions capability through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.
• Applies foundational technical knowledge of an architecture solution to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints.
• Supports customer/partner projects as needed for specified architecture solutions by investigating a solution area and assisting in research and testing out concepts developed by more senior architects.
• Identifies technical blockers (e.g., changing configurations, sample coding) for selected products to accelerate architecture implementations and routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party.
• Applies methodology and governance, as directed, to minimize business and technical risks and adhere to quality assurance while contributing to design and/or delivery of solutions (e.g. Well-Architected Framework, Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, Cloud Adoption Framework). Demonstrates an understanding of customer/partner conditions of success.

Practice Development

• Supports research projects and contributes to scoping surveys for customers/partners to assess potential intellectual property (IP) needs or process changes.

Trusted Advisor

• Works with internal teams and begins building relationships with customer/partner/MCS technical specialists under the guidance and supervision of others.
• Respectfully challenges customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalates appropriately.
• Learns Microsoft solutions and demonstrates an understanding of Microsoft's value to customers/partners.

Thought Leadership

• Provides input to virtual team members (e.g., Account team, enterprise channel managers, partner development manager [PDMs]) when asked, using a basic knowledge of specific Microsoft architectures and other relevant products. Actively looks for relevant communities to learn from.
• Participates in external architect community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with the internal team.

Customer Usage

• Participates in discussions around architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer business value. Ensures that the customer's environment and applications are well-architected.

Qualifications

We are currently hiring across a variety of teams with various levels of skills and experiences required. Below maps the minimum required qualifications to be considered for these positions.

Experiences Required – Education, Key Experiences, Knowledge and Skills:
Professional

• Professional Experience. 5+ years of success in consultative/complex technical sales and deployment projects, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of Cloud and/or hybrid computing environments
• 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.
• Problem Solving. Ability to solve customer problems through 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 (Senior Executives, IT management, Administrators and Developers)

Technical

• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management
• Experience with management of cloud infrastructure solutions (i.e. Windows and Linux IaaS, SAP, VMware, BCDR, Security, Management, Storage, Networking, OSS, containers, HPC, and Infra as a code technologies)
• Experience with Identity/Security (Azure): Identity, Security Architecture, Security Management and Network Security
• Experience and understanding of large-scale application portfolios in enterprise-wide environments (including migration of on-premise workloads to the cloud)
• 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.
• Software development practices like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Visual Studio).
• Understanding of competitive Landscape.
• Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field preferred
• Certification in one of the following technologies preferred: Cloud Infrastructure, Networking, Security, cloud-native application architecture (i.e. containers, microservices, API management), modern software development techniques like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure developer services, GitHub) and container orchestration systems (i.e. Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Azure Kubernetes Service, GitHub)
• Certification in one or more of the following programming languages preferred: C++, C#, Java, Node.js, Python

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.