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, an organization within CE&S, is leading the effort to enable customer success on the Microsoft Cloud by harnessing leading, AI-powered capabilities and human expertise to deliver innovation solutions that accelerate business value, drive operational excellence and nurture long term loyalty. We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) focusing on Data and AI solution area to join the Customer Success Team. As part of this role. you will be responsible for technical Customer engagements, working with the most challenging and exciting projects within Microsoft Azure customer base. This customer-facing position is a hands-on technical role spanning across design, build, and operations with a focus on issue. The role requires coaching team members to focus on customer experience through efficient delivery, driving adherence to Microsoft standards and recommended practices, and providing a holistic perspective of customer challenges and competitor architectures. The role is within the CSA Global Delivery team. It is a centralized group consisting of both full-time employees (FTEs) and Vendor CSAs dedicated to enhancing the customer's experience with Microsoft as they transition to hybrid/public cloud solutions. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home. 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. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home. 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
Customer Centricity · Gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving new feedback, insights, and resources across internal teams to add and prioritize. Represents the customer/partner to internal teams (e.g., Engineering) to shape products and services by providing insights across the territory. Advocates for the customer/partner at all opportunities and shares customer success stories with the wider internal team. · Guides other team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Supports definition of customer/partner conditions of success. Anticipates customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs and executes strategies to improve experience, value realization, and acceleration of customer transformation. · Actively listens and respectfully challenges customers/partners when going in the wrong direction, presents insights and alternatives, and takes action appropriately. Business Impact · Drives customer/partner relationships to anticipate, identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers to accelerate consumption and solution implementations (e.g., by application of technical capabilities). Routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party. Applies broad business and technical knowledge across various architecture or other Microsoft solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints. Shapes and enhances customers' requirements. · Proactively uses knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations to identify growth opportunities based on knowledge of customer/partner needs. Contributes to increase in consumption and aligns with Customer Success Account Management or other Account Team members on customer/partner priorities to drive growth in consumption via cost optimization, operational excellence performance efficiency, and security. Drives architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer/partner usage and consumption. Ensures that the customer/partner's application has as few points of failure as possible. Consults and provides thought leadership for technical solution design, development, and deployment and supports the customer/partner throughout implementation to achieve value outcomes and Microsoft's Customer Promise. · Understands industry trends and the competitor's architecture solutions and identifies Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to drive conversations with customers/partners and convince them of solution. Technical Leadership · Demonstrate the capability to act as CSA Pod Lead with ability to drive planning and delivery of Pod team by engaging CSAM and ATU, manage customer relationship by conducting monthly engagement reviews and assuring quality and be accountable for capacity planning, hiring, skilling and utilization of Pod members. · Proactively develops technical and professional learning and development plan in alignment with and support from their manager. Role models effective technical readiness. Acts as a mentor and role model to less experienced colleagues to educate them on technical and non-technical concepts. Participates in development opportunities (e.g., Ready, Build, Ignite). · Shares ideas, insights, and strategic technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using a thorough knowledge of specific Microsoft products and their context in the competitive landscape. Participates in external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with the internal team. · Generates new ideas for changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes for designated customers/partners. Drives opportunities for IP reuse, best practice sharing, and consumption acceleration. Proactively identifies gaps through delivery and communicating those gaps to others (e.g., Leadership, managed intellectual property [MIP], Design, and Governance). Applies subject matter expertise to develop new IP that fills identified gaps Important key criteria: • Should have potential to scale as CSA Pod Lead with ability to lead planning and delivery of vendor Pod team by engaging account team • Manage customer relationship by conducting monthly engagement reviews and assuring quality and be accountable for capacity planning, hiring, skilling and utilization of Pod members. Additional details

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. Additional or preferred qualifications Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 8+ 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 Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 6+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience. 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). • Level 300-400 advanced/experienced resource on SQL Server. Fundamentals should be clear with basic concepts, architecture of SQL Server. • Strong with SQL Server Core/Engine – Concepts, Architecture, Performance, High Availability (Failover Cluster, Availability Group), Migration/Upgrade, Security, Maintenance, Well versed with evolution of SQL server & enhancements with each version of SQL server, Hands on & practical experiences. • Breadth skills on other components like Power BI & SSRS, SSIS, SSAS and Azure (Data services). • Exceptional Hands on & practical experiences working on Reactive scenarios. Troubleshooting skills on Performance, High Availability (Failover Cluster, Availability Group), Migration/Upgrade, SQL setup/patches, Security, Maintenance. Should be able to handle SQL Server Administration & Operational troubleshooting reactive scenarios as needed. On reactive scenarios should be able to drive clear action plans, follow up to closure. • Technical Leadership quality and escalation handling skills. • Should be able to converse with stakeholders/business/application owners. • Collaborating & Partnering with team members internally & externally. • Ready to deliver as soon as possible. Should not be dependent on ramp up/training to start delivering on SQL related work. Demonstrate hands-on expertise in: • Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, SQL Pools, Spark Pools • Azure ML, Cognitive Services, OpenAI, Power BI, Microsoft Fabric • Databricks, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Synapse Pipelines • Ensure solutions meet enterprise-grade standards for performance, security, scalability, and governance. Technical Leadership • Serve as a trusted advisor to customer executives, architects, and developers on AI strategy, data governance, and analytics modernization. • Drive proof-of-concepts (POCs) and minimum viable products (MVPs) for AI and analytics use cases. • Guide customers in deploying ML models, building data pipelines, and operationalizing AI solutions • Lead technical engagements with enterprise customers focused on data modernization, advanced analytics, and AI/ML solutioning. • Architect and implement scalable solutions using Azure Synapse, Azure Databricks, Azure Machine Learning, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric. • Translate business requirements into technical architectures that leverage AI services, data lakes, real-time intelligence, and predictive analytics. AI-900: Azure AI Fundamentals (Required) DP-100: Azure Data Scientist Associate DP-600: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate DP-700: Fabric Data Engineer Associate PL-300: Power BI Data Analyst Associate DP-300: Azure Database Administrator Associate DP-420: Azure Cosmos DB Developer Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form. Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.

Cloud Solution Architecture