Cloud Solution Architecture IC5

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 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.

The Customer & Commercial Success Architect’s Office is seeking a Cloud Solution Architect with a passion for customer and partner success. In this role, you will focus on driving adoption of Databricks solutions on the Microsoft platform, partnering with Databricks and customers to help them achieve business outcomes from their Microsoft technology investments.

Using deep technical expertise across Databricks solutions and Microsoft Azure Data, Infrastructure, and AI services, you will lead partner and customer technical discussions, resolve blockers that affect customer success projects, and accelerate consumption. You will collaborate with Cloud Solution Architects, Customer Success Account Managers, Engineering, and Partner Development teams to drive measurable customer and partner outcomes. This role offers an opportunity to strengthen your technical leadership, expand your cloud expertise, and accelerate your career growth.

This role is ideal for a technically credible, customer-focused architect who can connect Databricks capabilities with Microsoft Azure platform strengths to accelerate adoption, remove technical blockers, and deliver measurable customer and partner outcomes.

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 and partner success

• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to Databricks, customers, and partners, helping them realize business value from their investments in Microsoft Azure and Databricks.
• Lead architecture reviews, technical strategy discussions, proof-of-concepts, and production deployments to accelerate adoption of data, analytics, AI, and modernization solutions.
• Guide customers and partners in implementing best practices for security, governance, reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
• Identify and resolve technical blockers that impact solution deployment, scalability, adoption, or customer success outcomes.

Solution architecture and technical leadership

• Design, validate, and optimize enterprise-scale architectures leveraging Databricks, Azure Data Services, AI Services, and cloud-native technologies.
• Drive technical assessments, workload modernization initiatives, and architectural reviews for strategic customer and partner engagements.
• Develop reusable intellectual property (IP), reference architectures, technical guidance, and deployment accelerators that improve solution scalability and repeatability.
• Influence technology roadmaps and platform decisions by providing architectural leadership and industry expertise.

Partner ecosystem and industry leadership

• Collaborate with Databricks, Microsoft Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, Product, and Partner teams to drive successful customer outcomes and adoption at scale.
• Lead virtual teams to address complex technical challenges and deliver cross-functional solutions.
• Represent Microsoft and Databricks in customer engagements, industry events, technical communities, and field enablement activities.
• Share customer and partner insights with Product and Engineering teams to influence product strategy and drive continuous improvement.

Consumption and business growth

• Drive Azure consumption, Databricks adoption, and customer success metrics across assigned accounts and partner engagements.
• Help partners develop and scale differentiated solutions and services that create customer value and accelerate cloud adoption.
• Collaborate with partner technical and sales teams to identify growth opportunities and expand the adoption of Microsoft Data, Analytics, and AI solutions.

Continuous learning and innovation

• Maintain deep expertise in Databricks, Azure, Data & AI technologies, industry trends, and competitive offerings.
• Demonstrate a growth mindset through continuous learning, technical skilling, and knowledge sharing.
• Contribute to Microsoft and Databricks thought leadership through technical insights, customer success stories, and best-practice development.

Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 7+ 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 Required Qualifications:

• 6+ years customer-facing technical sales experience.
• 6+ years experience leading technical projects.
• Deep expertise in Databricks, Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and modern Data & AI platforms, including data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and Generative AI workloads.
• Proven experience designing, architecting, and deploying enterprise-scale cloud solutions on Microsoft Azure, including Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure AI Services, and Azure Machine Learning.
• Strong background in building and modernizing data platforms, including data lakes, data warehouses, streaming architectures, and advanced analytics environments.
• Demonstrated success in customer-facing architecture, consulting, technical sales, customer success, or solution delivery roles, supporting complex enterprise transformations.
• Solid understanding of cloud architecture and operational excellence, including security, identity, networking, governance, reliability, scalability, and performance optimization.
• Experience influencing and engaging with executive stakeholders, technical decision-makers, architects, and engineering teams to drive strategic outcomes.
• Deep understanding of digital transformation trends, cloud platforms, and emerging Data & AI technologies, with the ability to translate technology capabilities into business value.
• Proven ability to lead the design, implementation, modernization, or support of large-scale distributed applications, data platforms, and analytics solutions.
• Excellent communication, presentation, collaboration, and stakeholder management skills.
• One or more of the certifications below or equivalent:

- Databricks

- Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional

- Microsoft Certified: Azure Databricks Data Engineer Associate (Exam DP-750)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or cloud/infrastructure technologies

- OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or cloud/infrastructure technologies

- OR equivalent experience.

• Insightful listening: Uses cognitive and behavioral listening techniques, asks thoughtful questions to understand partner and customer needs, business drivers, and operating environments, and goes beyond surface-level responses to uncover root issues.
• Situational fluency: Demonstrates self-awareness, interprets verbal and non-verbal cues, and adapts customer conversations based on the business context, audience needs, and engagement dynamics.
• Relationship building and trusted advisership: Builds trust, establishes credibility, and uses relationship mapping across account teams and customer stakeholders to strengthen engagement quality and business impact.
• Well-Architected Framework and Cloud Adoption Framework foundations: Describes the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework, explains how they are interconnected, applies Cloud Adoption Framework principles in cloud strategy and architecture conversations, and summarizes the relationship, commonalities, and differences between the two frameworks.
• Architecture design: Applies design thinking to create architectures that deliver customer value while incorporating policies, governance requirements, and existing customer systems into the overall solution framework.

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.

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.