Senior Cloud Solution Architect

Overview MCAPS-Core accelerates customer outcomes and business growth. By uniting product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners around a common customer mission, we help customers realize value faster and turn innovation into measurable business impact. Through deep technical expertise and differentiated go-to-market execution, we win competitively, capture market share, and scale repeatable growth motions. We differentiate through value creation - delivering world-class, AI-powered customer experiences that accelerate adoption, strengthen loyalty, and create sustainable competitive advantage, driving growth that outpaces the market. The Customer & Commercial Success (CCS) organization, an organization within MCAPS-Core, is the connected engine that turns Microsoft's commercial strategy into execution at scale - making it simpler and faster for the field to win for every customer, in every segment, region, and role. The organization brings together planning, landing, execution excellence, services portfolio and delivery, and field activation across ATU, STU, and CSU to accelerate customer value, drive growth, and strengthen the end-to-end experience across every customer moment. Are you passionate about helping enterprise customers design, operate, and optimize cloud-native applications and AI solutions on Microsoft Azure? This role combines deep technical engagement with customer partnership to improve the reliability, performance, security, and operational maturity of business-critical workloads. Join Support for Mission Critical and help customers realize measurable value from Azure platform services and AI. Support for Mission Critical is a team within Microsoft that provides solution-specific expertise designed to drive peak health and optimum performance of a customer's most important solutions. As a key technical resource for the customer, you will be primarily focused on delivering proactive services such as education workshops, delivering assessments, and providing tailored guidance. Troubleshooting skills are essential as this role will include working with Microsoft Support to expedite incident resolution. 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 Plan and deliver proactive technical advisory engagements and production-incident response, remotely and on-site as customer needs require. Collaborate within a virtual account team to strengthen customer relationships and develop near- and long-term plans for cloud-native modernization, Azure platform adoption, and operational maturity. Identify and prioritize opportunities across the Azure ecosystem to improve workload reliability, performance, scalability, availability, security posture, observability, and cost efficiency. Lead and contribute to proactive technical engagements, use telemetry and diagnostic data to identify performance and reliability risks, perform root-cause analysis, and recommend actionable remediation aligned with customer requirements. Partner with support, account, and product engineering teams to coordinate technical engagements, remove escalation barriers, and deliver a consistent customer experience during complex production incidents. Turn engagement and incident learnings into reusable guidance, automation, and blameless post-incident improvements that increase delivery quality across customers. Engage in and orchestrate meetings with customers and account teams to articulate service offerings. Share and gain knowledge through communities. Participate in an on-call rotation for high-severity incidents affecting Support for Mission Critical customers, helping coordinate rapid diagnosis, mitigation, recovery, and service continuity. Qualifications Required 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: Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role's job duties. Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire / transfer and every two years thereafter. 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). 3+ years of working experience with developing, debugging, performance tuning and supporting any of the following:? Microsoft Foundry, Azure AI services, or Azure OpenAI, including the development and operationalization of generative AI applications. Solid knowledge of Azure App Service, Azure Functions, and related cloud-native application hosting, integration, scaling, and deployment patterns. Hands-on experience with PowerShell, Azure CLI, Bash, and infrastructure-as-code or automation tools such as Bicep, ARM templates, or Terraform. Programming languages and frameworks used for cloud-native and distributed applications, such as C#, modern .NET, Java, and Python. Experience troubleshooting, configuring, and supporting solutions built on complex, distributed architectures. Proficiency with modern development and diagnostic environments, including logs, metrics, traces, debuggers, profilers, and platform telemetry, to perform root-cause analysis and develop customer-focused solutions. This may include creating reusable automation, diagnostic tooling, or sample code. Technical delivery and customer-facing communication skills, with the ability to explain complex architecture, reliability, security, and operational topics to both technical practitioners and executive stakeholders. Enterprise-scale experience in cloud and hybrid architecture, distributed application platforms, systems deployment, platform engineering, network operations, IT consulting, or cloud solution delivery in large enterprise environments. Understanding of cloud networking, identity and access, DNS, and APIs, load balancing, private connectivity, and distributed-systems fundamentals. Demonstrated ability to build durable, strategic customer relationships and serve as a trusted technical advisor who influences architecture, modernization, and operational decisions. Excellent customer service skills, good oral and written communication skills, proven ability to handle difficult and sensitive situations involving the most critical and politically charged customer situations. Ability to take on internal initiatives to create services opportunities while working in a fast-paced environment, balancing multiple demands, addressing shifting priorities, and maintaining a focus on key priorities. Demonstrated interpersonal and communication skills across diverse audiences, including developers, cloud and platform engineers, architects, security professionals, operations teams, and executive stakeholders. Cloud Solution Architecture IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $106,400 - $203,600 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 - $222,600 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. ( Microsoft Corporation