Sr Solution Architect

Overview

Do you enjoy solving problems, looking at problems through a different lens, and working closely with customers to innovate new solutions to complex problems? Do you jump with excitement at the opportunity to identify trends and provide unique business solutions? Do you want to join a team where learning about a new technology or solution is part of our work every day?

The Industry Solutions Delivery (ISD) Engineering & Architecture Group (EAG) is a global consulting and engineering organization that supports our most complex and leading-edge customer engagements. Driving early-stage deliveries, enhances ISD’s technical capabilities, and partnering with others to develop approaches, innovative solutions, and engineering standards in order to set our sales and delivery teams up for success. Leveraging the principles of model, care, and coach, we provide consistent high-quality customer experience through technical and AI leadership and IP capture centered on delivery truth.

As part of the team, you will be a key leader in the largest Security team in Industry Solutions Organization, learn in a fast paced, live-site focused environment, deliver customer value with everything we do and help protect Microsoft’s enterprise customers.

This Sr Solution Architect role offers an exciting opportunity to:

• Impact one of the fastest growing teams in Industry Solutions that is critical to the Microsoft Security strategy.
• Work in a world-class team of Security Analysts, Architects, Incident Responders, and leadership that will help you grow your career.
• Be part of a dynamic Security community that will enable you to learn, collaborate, and contribute with the top minds in the industry.

We are looking for someone who is highly customer focused with the right combination of curiosity, technical aptitude, and communication skills to become a Security Delivery Manager in the Security Service Line within the Industry Solutions Organization.

You will be part of a high-performing security organization and will be in a role that is focused on customer success and satisfaction. Since we are a security team, we focus a good deal on security technologies, so the ideal candidate will have strong Cybersecurity experience addressing complex customer scenarios in delivery and/or operations capacity. What’s also super important is that you can show empathy for customers, their business outcomes, and plans, and are proficient at guiding teamwork to deliver great security outcomes for our customers.

We are a team of fun, dynamic, supportive community of Program Managers, Architects, Incident Responders, Security Analysts, and our Leadership is committed to delivering the best Security solutions and services to our customers. We get to develop and run innovative Security services at extremely large scale for our enterprise customers, which presents challenges we love to solve.

If this sounds like the right environment for you, please join us.

Responsibilities

For this Sr Solution Architect role, we are in particular looking for a Security Architect with in-depth knowledge of Security Operation Center (SOC) operations and experience with Security Modernization. The architect will work alongside a Program Director to support managed Security Operations at our customers. The architect will also work closely with the customer and Microsoft Threat Hunting and Detection teams to improve performance, support risk reduction activities and envision further modernization and optimization opportunities.

Key Accountabilities Include:

Business to Technology Strategy

• Articulating value propositions for the most strategic Microsoft products and services, using business, technology and industry strategies to define customer/partner requirements and constraints.
• Actively and insightfully listen to translate and articulate customer challenges and translate these to business objectives and project outcomes.
• Support the sales process and provide input on contract, staffing, assumptions and risks.
• Quantify the needs of the business to achieve value outcomes, champion required methodology, capture/reuse IP and share best practices.
• Demonstrate ability to match technical solutions with customer business requirements.

Technology Delivery Management

• Strong leadership of Technical Delivery teams, driving high performance and collaboration in complex matrix environments.
• Demonstrate an understanding of and champions Customer/Partner Change management and adoption principles.
• Own Delivery Excellence.
• Demonstrate expertise in chosen field, drive opportunities to accelerate the adoption of the Microsoft Cloud.
• Drive and support innovation focusing on industry solutions and customer business outcomes on the Microsoft platform.
• Identify / Clarify and articulate business and technical risks in programs, assess their impact and propose mitigations / contingencies.
• Experience working on multi-phase implementations.
• Ability to communicate with a variety of different audiences and strong presentation skills.
• Ability to effectively recognize and adapt to change.
• A passion for learning about and experimenting with new technologies.
• Demonstrates valuable customer partner interactions, driving deep customer relationships.

SOC Service Operations Support

• Identify opportunities for automation in alert triage, case enrichment, and incident response.
• Support customer Security Operations teams, including analysts, engineers, and service delivery staff.
• Benchmark customer service performance and contribute to strategic planning and service evolution.
• Work with product and threat intelligence teams to adapt to emerging threats.
• Provide input into roadmap planning for SOC tooling, capabilities, and customer offerings.
• Manage to ensure that SLAs, KPIs, and contractual obligations are consistently met.
• Engage with clients through regular service reviews, incident debriefs, and advisory sessions.
• Coordinate onboarding, including log ingestion, alert baselining, and tuning.
• Support maintenance of documentation of standard operating procedures (SOPs), runbooks, and escalation matrices.
• Knowledge of Security Assessments and Reviews.
• Knowledge of security, threat modeling, incident response and recovery techniques.

Incident Management

• Oversee triage, investigation, containment, and resolution of security incidents.
• Lead incident post-mortems and root cause analysis (RCA).
• Manage escalation pathways to customer, legal, and executive stakeholders.
• Maintain quality assurance on incident response narratives and evidence collection.
• Drive playbook development and refinement based on incident learnings.

Detection Engineering

• Collaborate with detection engineers to support the building and fine-tuning of detection rules and use cases.
• Implement detection-as-code pipelines for consistency and auditability.
• Map detection coverage to cybersecurity frameworks and customer threat models.
• Use Case Lifecycle Management and continuous improvement and risk review.
• Represent Microsoft in the customer use case forum meetings.

Qualifications

We are looking for an Architect to join the team who will also focus on one or more of the following technical skill sets delivering integrated (cyber-)security & identity solutions to our customers.

You may already have at least 4 or more of these skills to help us achieve our mission, or you might be interested in learning about them.

• Proven success and expertise in architecting innovative solutions primarily in a client-facing role.
• Ability to quickly build relationships and credibility with customers.
• Ability to build trust to drive change with customers.
• Track record of delivering quality solutions as a technical leader.
• Executes recognized Architectural methods, processes and tools.
• A passion for learning about and experimenting with new technologies.
• Confidence in creating and delivering technical presentations and training.
• Excellent organization and planning skills.
• Bachelor’s degree relevant to Information Technology/Computer Science, Engineering (or equivalent).
• Technical knowledge of Microsoft security and identity technologies, such as Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Defender, Azure, Azure Security Center, and Sentinel.
• Experience with Identity solutions and concepts like Zero Trust, Privileged Access Management, Just-in-time Administration etc.
• Deep Knowledge of Cybersecurity concepts, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) and Credential Theft Mitigation recommended practices.
• Knowledge of Hybrid Cloud and Workload Security configurations and practices.
• Cloud application development solutions (e.g. PaaS, Serverless, API Management).
• Experience using integrated development environments (e.g. Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, XCode, WebSphere) targeting Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, public clouds (i.e. Azure, AWS, GCP).
• Ability to design, create and deliver to solution frameworks.
• Knowledge of various Security Standards, Policies and Governance frameworks.
• Knowledge of competitive security technologies.
• Holding active security certifications like CISSP, CEH or others is a plus.
• Open-source software experience is a plus.
• One or more of the following programming languages: C++, C#, Java, Node.js, JSON, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, Pig/Hive.
• Continuous integration technologies (e.g. Github Projects, Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure for DevOps, Chef, Puppet).
• Experience of working with agile project methodologies.

Key skills/competency

• Security Architecture
• SOC Operations
• Incident Response
• Cybersecurity
• Azure Security
• Identity Management
• Cloud Security
• Threat Modeling
• Technical Leadership
• Client Engagement