Cloud Solution Architect

Overview

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization at Microsoft is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated experiences. These experiences leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring we consistently exceed customer expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all 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.

Support Mission Critical (SfMC) is a dedicated team delivering support to Microsoft’s top-tier customers who use Microsoft technology to build true Mission Critical applications to run their business. These technically savvy customers have deep expertise in the Microsoft technologies they utilize. Examples include companies building banking backbones, stock exchanges, and large government entities.

Within the SfMC team, we support multiple technologies and products used by our customers via a single, dedicated team with diversified skill sets. This allows us to deliver an excellent support experience. Cloud Solution Architects on our team typically bring depth of experience in one or two technologies, but within SfMC, you will have the opportunity to expand your skill set, learn new technologies, and grow your leadership in areas you excel, without being isolated into a particular feature or product. You will deal directly with high-profile customers, often under the radar of executive management, and may occasionally receive direct communication from them.

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

As a Cloud Solution Architect, you will:

• Provide architectural reviews and technical guidance to Support for Mission Critical (SfMC) customers, focusing on reliability, security, and performance.
• Take end-to-end ownership and accountability of technical deliverables, ensuring alignment with customer business outcomes and Microsoft’s best practices.
• Identify architectural risks, design gaps, and operational inefficiencies across services.
• Engage with SfMC stakeholders to drive architectural validation, incident prevention, and workload health improvements through proactive engagements and deep technical assessments.
• Collaborate closely with Microsoft engineering and support teams to address escalations, share feedback, and align solutions with platform evolution.
• Drive creation and reusability of IP including scripts, tools, and technical documentation to support scalable SfMC engagements.
• Act as a trusted advisor to customer architects and engineers, influencing long-term technical strategy for stability, resilience, and innovation.

Business Impact

This role involves:

• Identifying and anticipating issues, advising customers/partners to operate and optimize performance in accordance with Microsoft best practices.
• Adapting methodology and applying governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks.
• Adhering to quality assurance standards and calculating risks while ensuring excellence in solution design and/or delivery.
• Leveraging standard tools to ensure accurate engagement hygiene.
• Driving customer/partner relationships to anticipate, identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers, accelerating consumption and solution implementations.
• Routing non-technical issues for resolution by the appropriate party.
• Applying broad business and technical knowledge across various architecture or other Microsoft solutions to meet business and IT requirements and resolve identified technical constraints.
• Shaping and enhancing customers' requirements.
• Proactively using knowledge of Microsoft's and competitors' products, services, and value propositions in customer/partner conversations to identify growth opportunities.
• Contributing to increased consumption and aligning with Customer Success Account Management or other Account Team members on customer/partner priorities to drive growth via cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, and security.
• Driving architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increased customer/partner usage and consumption.
• Ensuring the customer/partner's application has as few points of failure as possible.
• Consulting and providing thought leadership for technical solution design, development, and deployment, supporting the customer/partner throughout implementation to achieve value outcomes and Microsoft's Customer Promise.
• Understanding industry trends and competitors' architecture solutions, identifying Microsoft's strengths to drive conversations and convince customers/partners of solution value.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree AND 4+ years experience in engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects.

Additional/Preferred Qualifications:

• 6+ years of Teams/Skype for Business related experience with more than one of the following technologies.
• 6+ years of Teams/Skype related experience with at least 2 of the following:

Cloud Products:

• Experience with Microsoft Server products, and cloud products like Microsoft Teams.
• Experience with Voice over IP (VoIP) Services.
• Networking and connectivity to O365 and/or Azure clouds.
• Experience with supporting, planning and implementation of Office 365 products including Enterprise Voice, Conferencing, client connectivity, UM, and other Teams features.
• Experience with Messaging and Active Directory Federation Services technologies.
• Experience with Hybrid Directory Services technologies including ADFS and Azure AD.
• Knowledge of Office 365 product capabilities, troubleshooting, and monitoring tools.
• Experience with troubleshooting, configuring, and supporting Hybrid environments.
• Certification in Microsoft and other Cloud Technologies.
• Proven troubleshooting skills and experience with Teams and Skype.
• Ability to develop strategic ongoing customer relationships to gain the trust and respect of customers.

Design and Review Solutions Across:

• SharePoint Online and One Drive for business administration.
• SharePoint Online (Sites, Hub sites, permissions, sharing).
• Microsoft Teams + SharePoint integration.
• SharePoint Premium / Advanced Management.

Provide Guidance On:

• Information architecture & site lifecycle management.
• Retention, records management, and Microsoft Purview integration.
• Sensitivity labels, Conditional Access, and audit logging.
• Migration from on-prem SharePoint / file shares to SPO.

Drive Copilot readiness for SharePoint (content hygiene, permissions, governance).

Key skills/competency

• Cloud Architecture
• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Teams
• SharePoint Online
• Enterprise Voice
• Networking
• Security
• Reliability Engineering
• Performance Optimization
• Technical Guidance