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.

We are looking to hire hands-on Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) to join our diverse, talented, high performance, and innovative Technical Success team within the AI Apps & Agents focus area. The position is deeply technical and highly solution focused with unique opportunities to work on the most challenging and exciting projects within Microsoft, as well as providing an opportunity to drive feedback into core Microsoft products to help improve our platforms.

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

A Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) within the Technical Success team focused on AI Apps & Agents will be responsible for:

Customer-Centric Approach:

Understand customers' AI transformation business priorities and success measures.

Innovate with AI Application solutions that drive business value.

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. Curate and produce high quality guidance for our internal and external communities and customers.

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

Build repeatable IP and assets that create velocity in deployment and drive customer value from their Unified investment. Continuously look to improve upon these assets utilizing the best of field inputs.

Architect AI Applications & 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 Engineering team to address key blockers, and influence product improvements, roadmap and feature prioritization.

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, contribute to IP creation, and promote reusability to accelerate customer success, as well as collate feedback on assets to drive improvement and leverage field teams inputs.

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.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

Business Value: The ability to convey the business needs and value of proposed solutions, plans, and risks to stakeholders and decision makers. This includes the ability to persuade and inform based on facts and alignment with goals and strategy.

Trusted Advisership: The ability to build trusted advisor status and deep relationships across stakeholders (e.g., technical decision makers, business decision makers) through an understanding of customer needs and technologies.

Situational fluency: Using self-awareness as a mechanism to interpret verbal and non-verbal cues to increase your ability to "read the room."

Insightful listening: asking insightful questions to understand the customer needs, issues, business environment and drivers, and going beyond what customer has said.

Technical

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, Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI and CoPilot OR hands-on experience working with the respective products at the expert level.

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, Kubernetes, Docker, API Management).

Architecting Enterprise-Grade Solutions: 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.

DevOps and MLOps: Strong understanding of DevOps practices and CI/CD tool chains, and familiarity with MLOps (AI & ML lifecycle management) for sustainable enterprise grade deployments.

Core AI & ML Concepts: Familiarity with AI & ML foundational knowledge of concepts like Prompt Engineering, compute systems (GPU & FPGA), popular frameworks (TensorFlow & PyTorch), and tools (Jupyter notebooks & VS Code).

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, LLMs) 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

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.