Cloud Solution Architect (Cloud & AI)

Job Description

Overview

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture.

We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers’ expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft’s portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

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.

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. As a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) with deep expertise in Azure Data, Analytics, and AI services to lead transformative engagements for our customers. In this strategic role, you will drive architectural innovation, implementation excellence, and operational health across Microsoft Azure solutions.

We are looking for candidates that demonstrate business acumen, thought leadership, critical thinking, and negotiation skills with a track record of customer advocacy. The Senior CSA will balance technical and business objectives and will engage and influence senior leaders internally and externally to deliver high quality solutions and user experiences. Effective negotiating, influencing, and leadership skills mixed with creativity and deep subject matter expertise will be essential to achieve strategic alignment of goals across this broad range of stakeholders. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your technical program management and collaboration skills, and deepening your cloud expertise.

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities include:

• Developing reusable intellectual property (IP) and content assets that scale across field teams, customers and showcase value-based deliverables.
• Creating world-class collateral to empower internal field teams in delivering impactful customer outcomes.
• Supporting the Customer Success Unit (CSU) and customers in maximizing their Microsoft investments through hands-on architecture and solution delivery.
• Customer-Centric Approach: Identify customers' goals for migrating to Azure, and ensure the program provides Data & Analytics solutions that deliver business value. Customer Satisfaction
• Drive positive Customer Satisfaction & become a trusted advisor.
• Solicit feedback and understand their experiences with the service delivered.
• Ensure that solution exhibits high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, appropriate reusability, and reliability upon deployment.
• Develop opportunities to enhance Customer Success and help customers extract value from their Microsoft investments. Leverage subject matter expertise to identify resolutions for customer blockers.
• Identify the opportunities to develop repeatable IPs and integrate with Cloud Accelerate Factory.
• Apply technical knowledge to design solutions aligned with business and IT needs.
• Create modernized Data & Analytics platform solutions with infused AI, lead POCs and MVPs, and ensure long-term technical viability.
• Share insights and best practices, collaborate with the Engineering team to address key blockers, and drive product improvements.
• Broad knowledge of Azure Data & AI (Azure Data Factory, Azure Storage, SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Synapse, Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric).
• Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with key stakeholders. The ability to influence and build relationships across technical and business teams.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 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.
• Business Value: The ability to convey the business needs and value of proposed solutions, plans, and risks to stakeholders and decision makers. This includes the ability to persuade and inform based on facts and alignment with goals and strategy. Trusted Advisership: The ability to build trusted advisor status and deep relationships across stakeholders (e.g., technical decision makers, business decision makers) through an understanding of customer needs and technologies.
• Technical: Breadth of technical experience and knowledge in foundational security, foundational AI, architecture design, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise in one or more of the following: Enterprise-scale technical experience and depth with one or more areas of the Azure Analytics ecosystem (Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Power BI embedded, Azure Synapse analytics, Azure Analysis Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Data Lake) (required) Knowledge of Business Intelligence, design and build of Advanced Analytics and Big Data solutions, hands-on experience with data warehousing, Lakehouse architecture, Real time Intelligence, big data, analytics workloads (Azure or equivalent), semantic model development with knowledge of key differentiation to determine best fit for use cases and applications Experience creating Data & Analytics Proof of Concepts (PoC), Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for customers that lead to production deployments.
• Experience with Microsoft Fabric, DAX, T-SQL, PowerShell, C# (in the context of PBI/AS programming), Python (preferable) Competitive Landscape: Knowledge of key Data & Analytics platforms such as AWS, GCP, Snowflake, etc. Experience in shipping PySpark enabled data pipelines. Understanding batch, streaming ETL/ELT processing. Preferred experience/understanding on data lake house, data mesh architectural principles.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.