Principal Cloud Solution Architect

Overview

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization at Microsoft empowers customers to accelerate business value through differentiated experiences. Leveraging Microsoft’s products and services, we drive cross-company alignment and execution to consistently exceed customer expectations. CE&S is responsible for all services including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft’s portfolio, and is a key driver in accelerating AI transformation for customers globally.

The Global Customer Success (GCS) organization leads in creating the desired customer experience through support offer creation, digital transformation across tools, and operational excellence within CE&S.

As a Principal Cloud Solution Architect, you will partner with the fastest-growing strategic companies, acting as their technical advocate to ensure they receive the highest-level experience from Microsoft. This role focuses on deep technical capabilities for customers anticipating hyper-growth, emphasizing resiliency, workload expansion, co-innovation, strengthened reliability, and security through operational excellence. You will push customers to realize enhanced reliability, security, performance, and capacity, translating requests into actionable recommendations with a focus on rapid response and deep technical engagement.

Responsibilities

• 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, and mentor others.
• Employ a reliability-first mindset, focused on proactively testing features, simulating failures, integrating chaos engineering, and observability.
• Build and strengthen bridges across Microsoft, partnering closely with Microsoft Engineering to communicate complex concepts, fostering an inclusive environment that values diverse perspectives, and establishing trusted technical relationships with customer senior decision-makers (CTOs, product owners) and Microsoft stakeholders.
• Define account strategies for target customer portfolios, aligning business priorities with Customer Success Organization, Sales, and Engineering KPIs for enterprise-scale customers anticipating or going through hyper-growth.
• 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.
• 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.

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, 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.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements are required for this role, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check.
• Deep SQL expertise: Proven experience with SQL Server in enterprise environments, including performance tuning, high availability and disaster recovery, migration, and complex production troubleshooting.
• 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.

Key skills/competency

• Cloud Architecture
• Azure
• SQL Server
• IaaS
• Customer Advocacy
• Technical Leadership
• Reliability Engineering
• Digital Transformation
• Solution Design
• Enterprise Scale