Sr 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.

With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the mission of the Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft's products and services, ignited by our people and culture. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers achieve their business outcomes faster with technology that does more. 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.

As a Cloud Solution Architect aligned to the Azure AI platform for Microsoft's Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization, you will enable customers to achieve their outcomes based on their investments in Microsoft technology. Leveraging your Microsoft Azure Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technical subject matter expertise, you will lead technical conversations with customers and Microsoft colleagues, driving value to their organization. This is a hands-on role that includes accelerating customer adoption by building Generative AI solutions and identifying resolutions to unblock customer success projects for the AI Factory. You will also drive product influence with Engineering through technical feedback via the Factory and increase technical intensity with the Field team[MR1.1][PR1.2][PR1.3]s. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your technical and program management skills, and deepening your cloud expertise.

The Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft's end-to-end customer experience. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers come to us not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, but also because we provide differentiated and connected customer experience.

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.

CSAs are senior individual contributors who operate globally and engage directly with customers. It is a hands-on technical role spanning across design, build, and production with a focus on issue resolution to remove customer production blockers. Candidates are expected to comfortably switch from a whiteboard to the keyboard. This is a truly exciting role that will feature unique and challenging technical problems to solve and to help our customers succeed.

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-Centric Approach:

• Play a pivotal role in the AI Factory, providing technical enablement, operational support, and strategic engagement across customer projects. This role is designed to ensure successful delivery of AI solutions, troubleshoot complex issues, and support innovation through pilot evaluations and advanced use case development. Understand customers' overall data estate, business priorities, and IT success measures. Innovate with AI solutions that drive business value.

• Facilitate scalable delivery through strong technical program management utilizing a factory model/approach, driving program awareness and demand across the regional operating units. Attend in-flight project status meetings to monitor progress and identify support needs. Engage directly with complex or non-standard customer use cases beyond existing accelerators. Participate in intake reviews for milestone sizing, objection handling, and technical scoping.

• Ensure Solution Excellence: Deliver solutions with high performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, reusability, and reliability upon deployment. Gather insights from customers and partners.

Business Impact:

• Drive Consumption Growth: Develop opportunities to enhance Customer Success and help customers extract value from their Microsoft investments.

• Operational Awareness: Understanding of consumption metrics and their reflection on program effectiveness. Ability to collaborate with local teams for nominations and intake support.

• Unblock Customer Challenges: Leverage subject matter expertise to identify resolutions for customer blockers. Follow best practices and utilize repeatable IP.

• Identify and contribute repeatable IP and assets that create velocity in deployment and drives customer value from their Unified investment. Continuously look to improve upon these assets utilizing the best of field inputs. Evaluate pilot opportunities for potential integration into existing offerings.

• Architect AI Solutions: Apply technical knowledge to design solutions aligned with business and IT needs. Create Innovate with AI roadmaps, lead POCs and MVPs, and ensure long-term technical viability.

Technical Leadership:

• Advocate for Customers: Share insights and best practices, collaborate with the Factory team to address key blockers, and influence improvements, roadmap and feature prioritization.

• Resolve technical blockers: Debug technical issues and provide fixes for engagements encountering blockers.

• Continuous Learning: Stay updated on market trends, collaborate with the AI technical community, and educate customers about the Azure AI platform.

• Accelerate Outcomes: Through engaging with field teams, share expertise, drive factory pipeline, and promote Factory to accelerate customer success, as well as collate feedback upon execution to drive improvement and leverage field teams inputs.

Other Responsibilties:

• Embody our?culture ( ?and?values (

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business 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 Business Applications consulting

• OR equivalent experience.

Other Qualifications

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

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).

• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge in foundational security, foundational AI, architecture design, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise in one or more of the following:

• Deep Domain Expertise in Azure AI Areas: Deep domain expertise in one of the Azure AI specific areas, such as Cognitive Services, Azure OpenAI and CoPilot OR hands-on experience working with the respective products at the expert level. [MR2.1][MR2.2]Expertise with Azure AI Search and/or Vector Indexes, Azure Document Processing and /or equivalent OCR technology

• Programming Languages and Integration: Proficient with Python, C#, R, JavaScript, or similar programming languages in the context of application development, and ability to integrate Azure AI with other services (e.g., Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps, Docker, API Management).

• Architecting Enterprise-Grade Solutions: The ability to create and explain 3-tier architecture diagrams, system context diagrams, system interaction diagrams, etc.

• Proven experience building enterprise-grade, AI-focused solutions on the cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP) for customers, from Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) leading to production deployments.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Deployment: Strong understanding of Bicep, Terraform, or Azure Resource Manager and familiarity with configuration and deployment of IaC templates in a secure environment.

• Core AI & ML Concepts: Familiarity with AI & ML foundational knowledge of concepts like Prompt Engineering, tools (Jupyter notebooks & VS Code). [MR3.1]

• Agentic Workflows: Familiarity with Semantic Kernel, MCP, Langchain, or other agentic frameworks. Ability to configure tools for dynamic execution by an LLM

• Generative AI and Responsible AI: Knowledge of current and emerging AI technology, including Generative AI technology applications and use cases (including, but not limited to, Large Language Models) and Foundational models toolsets.

• Understanding of Responsible AI practice including ethical considerations, bias mitigation, and fairness.

• Competitive Landscape: Understanding the competitive landscape is valuable, candidates should be aware of key AI platforms beyond Azure, such as AWS and GCP. Knowledge of the AI open-source ecosystem

Cloud Solution Architecture IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $106,400.00 - $203,600.00 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $137,600.00 - $222,600.00 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

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. (