Cloud Solution Architect - Digital & Application Innovation

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centred 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.

The Digital & Application Innovation Cloud Solution Architecture team works with Enterprise customers to define and realize their digital transformation journey through application innovation and modernization. We empower developers to innovate and work with IT and business decision makers on their application modernization strategy and vision as key element of their overall innovation approach.

Microsoft's apps portfolio spans Azure App Platform, PowerApps, GitHub/DevOps and Visual Studio. Azure App Platform is one of the fastest growing businesses inside the Azure platform with tight integration with our developer tools. We want you to deliver on Microsoft's aspirations and goals in this dynamic and fast-growing enterprise market to land our Application Development platform with your customers.

As a Cloud Solution Architect, you will be a senior solution leader within our Customer Success Unit working with key customers. You will position and land our Microsoft App Innovation portfolio as a central member of a virtual account team of Sales Specialists, Customer Engineers, Account Managers and Account Technology Specialists as well as partners and other Microsoft functions.

Your focus is to win the hearts of developers at our customers, by positioning the Microsoft App Platform through architecture sessions, demos, workshops and game days. You have a wide array of offers and programs at your fingertips to achieve your goals. You will be a trusted advisor and a cloud application development subject matter expert for your customers and colleagues.

We are looking for an individual with a strong technical skillset in the area of development and application innovation while also having the business in mind. You have a passion to innovate with new business opportunities and work with your customers to define, commit and drive the implementation of the ideal solution.

You are an entrepreneurial character who combines technical expertise, industry insights, consulting experience and passion to achieve more within a strong team! The ideal candidate is open minded and approaches the role with a strong mix of technical expertise, a thought leadership attitude as well as a go-doer mentality.

Responsibilities

As a Cloud Solution Architect, your understanding of the customers' overall applications portfolio, IT and business priorities, and success measures will help you to recommend integration strategies, architectures, platforms, and application infrastructures based on best practices on Microsoft Azure.

• Apply technical knowledge and customer insights to create a modernization roadmap. Design solutions to meet business and IT needs, ensuring technical viability of new projects and successful deployments, while orchestrating key resources and infusing key Application Development and DevOps technologies (e.g. App Service, containers, serverless, event-driven and microservice architectures, etc.) as appropriate.
• Ensure all solutions exhibit high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, and appropriate reusability and reliability upon deployment.
• Develop deep relationships with key customer IT decision makers, who drive long-term cloud adoption within their company to enable them to be cloud advocates. To achieve this, lead the execution of technical engagements such as Technical Briefings, Proof of Concepts, Architectural Design Sessions, and Hackathons.
• Be the Voice of the Customer; share insights and best practices, and connect with Engineering teams to remove key blockers, drive platform evolution and share best practices.
• Assess the Customers' knowledge of Azure platform and overall cloud readiness to help customers develop the technical skills & expertise they need to succeed. Develop a structured learning/enablement plan and ensure its delivery through partners.
• Be inclusive and collaborative in your work practices, driving teamwork and working with virtual teams across functions & geographies.
• Be an Azure Platform evangelist with customers, partners and external communities.
• Be a learn-it-all and apply a growth mindset, with a belief that your skills can always be improved through honest reflection and persistent effort. Understand and keep up to date with technology trends and opportunities.

Qualifications

Technical Expertise: Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management. Subject matter expertise in one or more of the following:

• Application development platforms on public clouds and/or Azure including development frameworks and languages.
• Scalable architectures using API management, serverless technologies, container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, AKS etc.), microservice frameworks, Azure App Service, etc.

Relationship Building: Ability to build deep technical relationships with senior IT executives and developers 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 applications development and 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, Engineers).

Education: Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field or equivalent experience.

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. 

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.