Senior Cloud & AI Cloud Solution Architect

Senior Cloud & AI Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft

Overview

We’re seeking a Senior Cloud & AI Cloud Solution Architect who proactively acts as the voice of the customer/partner and internal communities, leveraging relevant insights from feedback tools and systems. This role involves identifying and translating customer/partner problems into industry solutions, focusing on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless, connected experience. You will proactively identify, escalate, and mitigate blockers, delivering solutions in line with company methodologies and ensuring proven practices and patterns are followed.

A key aspect is proactively identifying new opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion at scale, operating according to required operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages. Leveraging market insights and demand signals, you will contribute to leading virtual teams using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape, identifying gaps to enable solutions to scale across customers.

This is an opportunity to make a meaningful impact by enabling customers to realize the full potential of the cloud. The Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences, leveraging Microsoft’s products and services. CE&S drives cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring consistent excellence in every interaction. Join CE&S to help accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

The Microsoft Federal organization addresses the unique mission, legal/regulatory requirements, and procurement rules of the United States Government (USG). Microsoft Federal is committed to ensuring its resources, including appropriately qualified personnel with necessary security clearances, are available to meet USG evolving needs. Personnel can expect to serve in various roles across Civilian, Defense, or intelligence communities.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture embraces a growth mindset, inspiring excellence and encouraging teams to bring their best each day. You can help us achieve this mission.

Responsibilities

Business Impact

• Operate according to required operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record (e.g., pipeline updates, time tracking).
• Collaborate across Microsoft and customer/partner teams through on-strategy delivery to achieve customer/partner objectives and increase satisfaction.
• Proactively manage business and technical risks, adapting methodology and applying governance principles to identify, communicate, and minimize risks.
• Execute work in compliance with industry and Microsoft guidelines and procedures, continuously prioritizing competing demands to ensure alignment with business priorities.
• Deliver solutions in line with company methodologies (e.g., value-based deliverables [VBDs], advice, training, technical validation), preparing customers for operational readiness and achievement of business goals.
• Leveraging knowledge of change management proven practices, proactively help the customer deploy for long-term organizational adoption to increase customer satisfaction and drive consumption/usage.
• Guide 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.
• Provide feedback to the Unified Delivery Team on VBDs to refine and further develop content.
• Proactively identify 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 to empower cloud success, foster and strengthen security and resiliency, and drive AI innovation.
• Actively listen to and respectfully challenge customers/partners, building trust to then advocate for alternative architectures/solutions/approaches that shape and/or enhance customer requirements.
• Identify and evaluate industry trends, gather customer/partner insights, and map existing architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes.
• Proactively capture opportunities in appropriate systems, processes, and tools, working collaboratively across the organization.
• Proactively identify, escalate, and mitigate blockers using appropriate tools and processes to accelerate solution deployment, value realization and usage/consumption.
• Apply business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge to architecture or support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints.

Customer Centricity

• Proactively act as the voice of the customer/partner, sharing ideas, feedback, insights, success stories and strategic/technical input with Engineering teams, Product Offerings teams and internal communities.
• Identify patterns of feedback across customers/partners/territories/industries and leverage them to develop strategic and actionable insights.
• Present business cases to program managers to influence product roadmaps, decision making, bug fix prioritization, and own and drive initiatives.
• Identify and/or translate customer/partner problems into industry solutions aligned with Microsoft product and platform strategy, explaining how they meet customer/partner outcomes and ROI goals.
• Proactively help the customer/partner adopt and use Microsoft product/platform strategy-aligned (cross-solution area) solutions.
• Build relationships with technical decision makers (TDMs) and help build the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs).
• Independently interact as needed with customers/partners' Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and other C-level (CXO) roles to bridge understanding of security, compliance, operational and risk requirements.
• Drive self and guide other team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience.
• Define customer/partner conditions of success by leveraging an understanding of customer goals.
• Anticipate and address customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs, and execute strategies to improve customer experience, value realization, and acceleration of transformation.

Partner Specialization

• Identify and prioritize several opportunities that align with revenue goals, and orchestrate growth of solution utilization pipeline with partners.
• Provide assistance with partner and sales teams to bring clarity to specific opportunities through proof of concept and technical pre-sales support.
• Understand solution area-specific market opportunities and collaborate with Global Partner Solutions (GPS) business stakeholders to lead and execute initiatives.
• Proactively guide and support partners in developing repeatable offerings, practices, products, and solutions.
• Advise the partner throughout initial strategic customer implementations.

Technical Leadership

• Leverage market insights and demand signals to assist leadership in identifying relevant areas for up-skilling and/or accreditations.
• Role model technical readiness and influence the team to drive their own technical readiness.
• 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.
• Proactively identify gaps through delivery, communicate those gaps to relevant team members and internal/external stakeholders, and connect patterns across business and technology areas that drive changes and improvements to products, IP, technologies, and/or processes/practices that enable solutions to scale.
• Contribute to the development and modification of Microsoft's structured frameworks and methodologies.
• Provide thought leadership and innovation to customers/partners and internal communities at the local level.
• Contribute to leading virtual teams (v-teams) around technologies and customer/partner challenges, sharing ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input across Microsoft.
• Demonstrate strong industry knowledge and increase recognition for Microsoft solutions by contributing to and sometimes leading presentations and engagements with external and internal audiences.
• Contribute to intellectual property (IP) and identify patterns where no IP exists (e.g., CoPilot and AI scenarios) to help build scalable and repeatable models.
• Participate in external technical and non-technical community events that elevate the Microsoft brand and shares learnings across internal teams.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 4+ 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:

• Security Clearance Requirements: Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements for this role. The successful candidate must have an active U.S. Government Secret Security Clearance. Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination.
• Clearance Verification: This position requires successful verification of the stated security clearance to meet federal government customer requirements. You will be asked to provide clearance verification information prior to an offer of employment.
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
• Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of U.S citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customers and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport, or other approved documents, or verified US government clearance.

Additional Or Preferred Qualifications:

• 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).

Ideal location for this role: DMV area and Colorado

Key skills/competency

• Cloud Architecture
• AI Solutions
• Customer Experience
• Digital Transformation
• Azure
• Solution Design
• Technical Leadership
• Risk Mitigation
• Partner Engagement
• Federal Government