Principal Cloud Solution Architect

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 is leading the effort to create the desired customer experience through support offer creation, driving digital transformation across our tools, and delivering operational excellence across CE&S.

Do you have a passion and interest in partnering with the fastest growing strategic companies, being their technical advocate to ensure they’re receiving the highest-level experience available from Microsoft? Support for Mission Critical is looking for deep technical architects, aligned to strategic customers who are undergoing or anticipating hyper-growth. Target customers require deep technical capabilities: resiliency, workload expansion, market leadership through co-innovation, strengthened reliability and security through operational excellence. You’ll push customers to realize enhanced reliability, security, performance and capacity, correlating their requests or platform events into actionable recommendations, and emphasizing rapid response, customer advocacy, and deep technical engagement.

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 of the Principal Cloud Solution Architect

• Actively listen and empathize with customers to anticipate their needs, advocate for them within Microsoft, and measure success by customer satisfaction and operational excellence.
• Act as a technical leader to drive vision for the team and customers, pilot new models and data usage, scale successful practices and design patterns across the organization, and mentor others to grow their technical capabilities.
• Employ a reliability-first mindset, focused on proactively testing features, simulating failures, integrating chaos engineering, observability, and similar driving perpetual innovation.
• Build and strengthen bridges across Microsoft working seamlessly across teams and cultures, partnering closely with Microsoft Engineering, to communicate complex concepts in clear, actionable terms, fostering an inclusive environment that values diverse perspectives, establishing trusted technical relationships both with customer senior decision-makers (CTOs, product owners) as well as Microsoft stakeholders.
• Define account strategies for target customer portfolios, focused on enterprise scale customers anticipating or going through hyper-growth, aligning business priorities with Customer Success Organization, Sales, and Engineering KPIs.
• Maintain a culture of curiosity, diving beyond typical root-cause analysis to understand decision making and history of circumstances to drive continuous improvement; correlate customer requests or platform events to actionable recommendations with clear accountability by the customer and/or Microsoft.
• Measure success via resiliency targets, adoption metrics, escalation prevention, customer satisfaction, impact avoidance, business outcomes and operational excellence (reliability, security, performance, capacity), highlighting outcome-based results that positively differentiate the value of the team.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 7+ 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:

• Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role’s job duties.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Deep technical acumen: level-500 expertise in one Azure domain; broad familiarity with others.
• Proven ability to manage complex, highly available services and triage customer escalations.
• Exceptional communication and relationship-building skills.
• Azure IaaS expertise: Strong hands on experience designing, deploying, securing, and operating Azure IaaS solutions, including virtual machines, networking, storage, and hybrid architectures at scale.
• SAP on Azure: Breadth of technical experience and knowledge, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise in SAP on Azure.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire / transfer and every two years thereafter.

Key skills/competency

• Cloud Architecture
• Customer Success
• Technical Leadership
• Solution Design
• Azure IaaS
• Reliability Engineering
• Customer Advocacy
• Strategic Planning
• Operational Excellence
• Escalation Management