Principal Architect - Data AI

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us achieve our mission.

Microsoft Services India Global Delivery delivers end-to-end solutions by enabling accelerated adoption and productive use of Microsoft technologies. We are looking for exceptional architects who have a passion to lead large, complex, innovative programs for customers-now with a focus on AI-driven transformation.

The Data & AI Architect is a critical role in the solution implementation lifecycle, cutting across all phases. Architects are technical leaders with a strong understanding of both application and AI technologies, and the ability to apply them to drive business outcomes. This role leads solution architecture, technical design, and governance throughout the lifecycle of Azure Cloud and AI-based solutions. Architects have a passion for the customer, demonstrated through professionalism and striving for excellence in all aspects of the customer experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead client engagements from definition through delivery to ensure technical and AI transformation success for our customers.
• Collaborate with enterprise customers to scope and define requirements, architect and design solutions, and deliver transformational, customized industry solutions and services, including AI-powered applications.
• Ensure all solutions exhibit high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, appropriate reusability, and reliability upon deployment.
• Develop deep relationships with key customer decision makers (both Business and IT) who drive long-term innovation and transformation to our customers’ product roadmap.
• Be a Voice of Customer to share insights and best practices, connect with Engineering teams to remove key blockers and drive product improvements.
• Proactively identify opportunities for integrating modern architecture patterns and emerging technical solutions-including AI, machine learning, and generative AI-into current designs.
• Evaluate, identify, mitigate and eliminate risk, provide guidance, and propose immediate solutions.
• Communicate effectively with all stakeholders, including senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, Developers, Data Scientists, and IT Management.
• Lead deep technical architecture discussions and development of POCs, including AI solution prototypes.
• Guide customers to production deployment and operationalization of both application and AI solutions.
• Apply technical knowledge and expertise to architect and design solutions that meet business and IT needs, create solution roadmaps, drive POCs and MVPs, and ensure long-term technical viability of new deployments, infusing key technologies where appropriate.
• Collaborate with other Architects and technology stakeholders to develop complex end-to-end Enterprise grade solutions.
• Create exceptional cross-team collaboration and communication. Partner with all required Microsoft stakeholders and partners to drive role clarity, account coverage, project assignment, and effective cross-team collaboration.
• Ensure delivery of high-quality production deployments that are resilient and successful.
• Coach and enable your team members to accelerate innovation programs to production, including guidance on architectural design, technical recommendations, blocker escalations, and technical resource orchestration.

Technology Areas:

Application Development

• Extensive experience in implementing, operating, customizing, tuning, and troubleshooting Cloud solutions.
• Designing scalable solutions on cloud platforms with focus on performance and resiliency, utilizing microservices architectures.
• Engineering distributed applications within architectural scenarios such as Web, IoT, and AI-powered systems.
• Application design patterns, and anti-patterns, such as MVC, CQRS, SAGA.
• Interacting with and querying databases and/or NoSQL datastores.
• Application monitoring and end-to-end telemetry.
• Containers for packaging application deployment units and interacting with container-orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes, Service Fabric, Cloud Foundry.
• Defining CI/CD pipelines to automate test and release across different application environments using concepts such as Blue/Green and Canary deployments and related technologies.
• Source code management using Git or other source control technologies.
• Open source technologies and frameworks.

AI & Data Science

• Experience architecting, designing, and deploying AI solutions using Azure AI or other similar cloud services.
• Proficiency in building, training, and operationalizing machine learning models, including generative AI and LLMs.
• Familiarity with AI solution design patterns, responsible AI principles, and ethical AI practices.
• Hands-on experience with AI agentic frameworks, multi-agent orchestration, and integration of AI agents into enterprise applications.
• Programming skills in Python, R, and/or C# for AI development.
• Knowledge of AI certifications and demonstrated learning in the merging areas of AI Stack
• Design and Implementation approach towards Data governance, logging, and lineage for AI solutions.
• Experience with cloud databases such as Azure SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, and Azure Cosmos DB.
• Data pipeline creation, ETL/ELT processes, and managing large datasets (structured and unstructured).

Other

• Embody our culture and values

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 technology domain.
• 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 technology domain.
• OR equivalent experience.
• Additional or Preferred Qualifications:
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 20+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or technology domain.
• OR Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or technology domain.
• OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years technical sales experience.
• 6+ years project management experience.
• Technical or Professional Certification in AI Domain.
• Inclusive and collaborative - driving teamwork and cross-team alignment.
• Strong partner relationship management and solution development skills.
• Conversant knowledge of competing platforms and solutions.
• Proven track record of building deep relationships with CXOs.
• Strong executive presence including communication and presentation skills with a high degree of comfort to large and small technical audiences.
• Problem solving mentality leveraging internal and/or external resources, conflict resolution, and follow through with partners.
• Orchestration of application and AI development lifecycle.
• Experience in vertical industries, proven by projects/solutions implemented with substantial business processes covering Financial and Insurance, Manufacturing, Consumer Goods, Healthcare/Life Sciences, Retail, or other business to consumer industry scenarios.
• Demonstrable architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of complex application and AI architectures.
• Candidates must also demonstrate ability to adapt to new technologies, learn quickly, and understand relevant cloud and AI trends.

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.