Cloud Solution Architect - Cloud & AI Data Platform

Overview

We are looking for a Cloud Solution Architect - Cloud & AI Data Platform with deep knowledge in data platforms and analytics to support customers in building secure, scalable, and AI-ready solutions on Microsoft Azure.

In this customer-facing role, you'll guide organizations through their data modernization and AI journeys—leading architectural design sessions, proof-of-concept initiatives, and production deployments for mission-critical workloads. Your focus will be on ensuring performance, resiliency, and security across solutions that drive measurable business value.

As a key member of the Cloud & AI Data Platform team, you'll use established repeatable IP and execution frameworks to deliver high-quality outcomes and accelerate solution adoption. You'll work with cutting-edge technologies such as Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, Cosmos DB, and Purview, helping unlock the full value of their data and AI investments.

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.

Responsibilities

Business Impact:

• Operates according to required operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record (e.g., pipeline updates, time tracking) with minimal guidance from more experienced peers.
• Collaborates across Microsoft and customer/partner teams through on-strategy delivery with minimal guidance from more experienced peers to achieve customer/partner objectives and increase/partner customer satisfaction.
• Contributes to managing business and technical risks, adapting methodology and applying governance principles to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks.
• Executes work in compliance with industry and Microsoft guidelines and procedures.
• Prioritizes among competing demands in their work and identifies where impact occurs with customers, ensuring alignment with business priorities and goals.
• Contributes to the identification, escalation, and mitigation of blockers using appropriate tools and processes to accelerate solution deployment, value realization and usage/consumption.
• Continues to develop business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge and applies it to architecture or support projects to help meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints.
• Identifies new opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion (especially Enhanced Solutions) at scale based on business value to customer/partner and clear understanding of the Microsoft value proposition for supported platforms.
• Actively listens to and respectfully challenges customers/partners, building trust to then advocate for alternative architectures/solutions/approaches that shape and/or enhance customer requirements.
• Contributes to the identification and evaluation of industry trends, gathering of customer/partner insights, and mapping of existing architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes.
• Proactively captures opportunities in appropriate systems, processes, and tools, working collaboratively across the organization to execute on opportunities aligned with Microsoft's Customer Engagement Model.
• Delivers solutions in line with company methodologies, ensuring proven practices and patterns are followed to prepare customers for operational readiness and achievement of their business goals.
• Contributes to helping the customer deploy for long-term organizational adoption to increase customer satisfaction and drive consumption/usage.
• Guides customers/partners towards a well-architected (e.g., secure, resilient, artificial intelligence [AI]-enabled), and cost- and performance-optimized solution to increase retention and expansion opportunities.
• Contributes to providing feedback to Unified Delivery Team on VBDs to refine and further develop content.

Customer Centricity

• Focuses on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience.
• Learns and develops an understanding of customer goals, and contributes to the definition of customer/partner conditions of success.
• Addresses customer/partner dissatisfaction, and may contribute to the execution of strategies to improve customer experience, value realization, and acceleration of transformation.
• Contributes to identifying and/or translating customer/partner problems into industry solutions aligned with Microsoft product and platform strategy.
• Helps the customer/partner adopt and use Microsoft product/platform strategy-aligned (cross-solution area) solutions.
• Builds relationships with technical decision makers (TDMs) and contributes to helping build the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs).
• Supports interactions as needed with customers/partners' key stakeholders for bridging understanding of security, compliance, operational and risk requirements.
• Acts as the voice of the customer/partner, sharing ideas, feedback, insights, success stories and strategic/technical input with Engineering teams.
• Contributes to the identification of patterns across customers/partners/territories/industries and leveraging them to develop strategic and actionable insights.
• May present business cases to program managers to influence product roadmaps, decision-making, bug fix prioritization, and own and drive initiatives as appropriate.

Partner Specialization

• Gains insight into solution area-specific market opportunities and initiates actions to address them with support from peers and leadership.
• Guides partners in developing offerings, practices, products, and solutions.
• Assists the partner throughout initial customer implementations.
• Delivers technical enablement.
• Identifies and focuses on opportunities that align with revenue goals.
• Drives growth of solution utilization pipeline with partner by unblocking technical blockers in customer deals.
• Provides support to partner and sales teams to clarify specific opportunities through proof of concept and technical pre-sales support.

Technical Leadership

• Leverages market insights and demand signals to assist more experienced peers in identifying relevant areas in which to drive upskilling or accreditations based on demand.
• Demonstrates technical readiness, both depth-aligned to solution area priorities and breadth-aligned to Customer Success Unit (CSU)/corporate initiatives.
• May act as a mentor, leading readiness and upskilling activities in the team/organization by educating colleagues on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing proven practices.
• Contributes to virtual teams (v-teams) around technologies and customer/partner challenges, sharing ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input with technical teams.
• Demonstrates industry knowledge and helps grow recognition for Microsoft solutions by contributing to presentations and engagements with external and internal audiences.
• Supports team members on contributing to intellectual property (IP) and identifying patterns where no IP exists to help build scalable and repeatable models.
• Participates in external technical and non-technical community events that elevate the Microsoft brand and shares learnings across internal teams.
• Identifies gaps through delivery, communicates those gaps to relevant team members and internal/external stakeholders, and connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas that drive changes and improvements to products, IP, technologies, and/or processes/practices.
• May contribute to the development and modification of Microsoft's structured frameworks and methodologies.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 2+ years 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 OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements

• This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Candidates must have authorization to work in the United States that does not now or in the future require employer sponsorship.

Additional Or Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 8+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• 4+ years experience working on technical projects.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).

Key skills/competency

• Cloud Architecture
• AI Data Platforms
• Microsoft Azure
• Data Modernization
• Scalable Solutions
• Customer Engagement
• Solution Design
• Performance Optimization
• Security & Resiliency
• Big Data Technologies