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.

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

Responsibilities

Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment

• 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. Adapts business models, plans, and solutions to insights.
• Acts 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

• Leverages and champions an existing architecture approach to achieve Microsoft's agreed commitments to the customer/partner. Identifies growth opportunities based on knowledge of customer/partner needs.
• 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 business value through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.
• Applies broad technical knowledge across various of architecture solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints. helps to shape and enhance customers' requirements.
• Leads customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture(s). Provides thought leadership for technical architecture design, development, and deployment and supports/drives the customer/partner throughout pre-sales and/or implementation.
• 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.
• Adapts methodology and applies governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks (e.g. Well-Architected Framework, Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, Cloud Adoption Framework). Defines customer/partner conditions of success, adheres to quality assurance, and calculates risks while designing and/or delivering solutions.

Practice Development

• Generates new ideas for changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes for designated customers/partners. drives opportunities for IP re-use, best practice sharing, and consumption.

Trusted Advisor

• Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner/MCS architects and technical specialists, technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders.
• 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

• Leads architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer business value. Drives efforts to ensure that the customer's environment and applications are well-architected.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years technical architect, technical consulting, design and implementation, and/or technical sales experience
• OR relevant certifications from Microsoft or competitive platforms AND 3+ years technical architect, technical consulting, design and implementation, and/or technical sales experience
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology (IT), Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years technical architect, technical consulting, design and implementation, and/or technical sales experience

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 Required
• 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. Required
• Problem Solving. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies Required
• 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) Required

Technical

• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management Required
• 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) Required
• Experience with Identity/Security (Azure): Identity, Security Architecture, Security Management and Network Security Required
• Experience and understanding of large-scale application portfolios in enterprise-wide environments (including migration of on-premise workloads to the cloud) Required
• 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. Required
• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud native app hosting through software design, development,
• Deployment and app refactoring/migrations Preferred
• Software development practices like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Visual Studio). Preferred
• Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of cloud development platforms preferred. Preferred
• Web application server technologies, cloud application design, software architecture and practices; (design/development/deployment, Agile, SCRUM, ALM) Preferred
• Partners. Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs Preferred

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field preferred
• Certification in one of the following technologies preferred: Cloud Infrastructure, Data Analytics, 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