Senior Cloud Solution Architect

Overview

With over 18,000 employees worldwide, 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 a differentiated and connected customer experience.

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 a differentiated and connected customer experience.

As a Cloud Solution Architect - AI Cognitive Services & AI Platform, you will enable customers to achieve their outcomes, based on their investments in Microsoft technology. Leveraging your Microsoft Azure and AI technical subject matter expertise, you will lead technical conversations with customers and Microsoft colleagues, to drive value from their MS investments. This includes accelerating customer adoption by building Generative AI solutions and identifying resolutions to issues impeding customer success projects. You will also drive product influence with Engineering and increase technical intensity in the field. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your technical and collaboration skills, and deepening your cloud expertise.

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 100% from home.

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

• Accelerate customer engagements from Proof of Concept to Production for Azure Cognitive Services, Azure OpenAI and Azure Machine Learning, including Azure OpenAI service, Azure Speech, Azure Cognitive Search, and Form Recognizer
• Unblock and accelerate customer engagements from PoC to Production for Azure AI workloads including Azure Cognitive Services, Azure OpenAI, and Azure Machine Learning
• Expand and grow Azure Cognitive services adoption for existing customer base
• Provide customers with Generative AI expertise and advisory through architecture designs, proof of concepts, and production reviews
• Collaborate with other Microsoft stakeholders to deliver workaround solutions to help unblock customers opportunities with complex end to end Enterprise AI solutions
• Lead and provide guidance in technical escalations to unblock AI customers in collaboration with multiple stakeholders
• Provide expert perspective to key stakeholders to increase platform adoption through customer insights & feedback
• Drive product improvement and influence roadmap with Engineering through deep technical insights
• Increase AI technical intensity in the Field through upskilling, sharing best practices and scaling repeatable IP

Customer Centricity

• Gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs) and leverages these insights and existing plans to map solutions with customer/partner business outcomes. Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving awareness of existing feedback, insights, and resources with internal teams to add and prioritize. Shares customer success stories with the wider internal team.
• Identifies and begins developing impactful relationships with internal teams and customer and partner technical specialists during initial preparation and ramp-up stages. Proposes viable solutions based on specific technical products. Demonstrates complex concepts, and proves the capability of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. Understands how work aligns with customer success plan and meets customer/partner needs by working with internal teams to deliver customer outcomes. Supports customer skilling by delivering as a trusted technical advisor to ensure customer readiness by facilitating technical discussions and enabling operational health and cloud readiness. Transfers knowledge to customers close customer skill gaps.
• Contributes to customer satisfaction by providing a positive customer/partner experience. Demonstrates an understanding of customer/partner conditions of success. Identifies dissatisfied customers and builds remedial actions (e.g., post-mortem reviews).
• Actively listens and respectfully challenges customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalates appropriately.

Business Impact

• Independently identifies issues and advises customers/partners to operate and optimize performance in accordance with Microsoft best practices. Escalates issues to senior team members or manager, as needed. Applies methodology and governance to minimize business and technical risks and adhere to quality assurance while ensuring excellence in contributions to design and/or delivery of solutions. Adheres to quality assurance standards and calculates risks while ensuring excellence in the design and/or delivery of solutions. Leverages standard tools to ensure accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.
• Independently works with the customer to identify, determine root causes, and resolve blockers to accelerate consumption and solution implementation (e.g., by application of technical capabilities). Identifies non-technical issues and escalates for removal by the appropriate party. Applies business and technical knowledge of architecture or other Microsoft solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints. Helps to shape and enhance customers'' requirements.
• Leverages knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations to assess customer/partner needs and independently identify growth opportunities. Leverages an existing architecture approach or reference architecture to propose a solution or achieve Microsoft''s Customer Promise. Identifies opportunities to expand or accelerate consumption (e.g., cloud and support). Participates in discussions around architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer/partner usage and consumption. Independently consults on technical solution design, development, and deployment and supports the customer/partner throughout implementation to achieve value outcomes and Microsoft''s Customer Promise.
• Understands the competitor's architecture solutions and identifies Microsoft''s strengths over competitive solutions to demonstrate Microsoft''s value to customers/partners.

Qualifications

Technical Experience

• Technical Program Management experience is highly preferred
• Enterprise-scale technical experience with two or more AI pillars (Azure Cognitive Services, Azure OpenAI, Azure Machine Learning, or equivalent), Open-Source AI frameworks, MLOps, cloud and hybrid infrastructure and architecture design
• "Hands on" experience creating AI Proof of Concepts, and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) leading to production deployments
• The technical aptitude and experience to learn new technologies and understand market and relevant cloud trends
• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge preferred:

1. Generative AI
2. Application development skills - ability to implement a back end orchestration app (Python or similar) and integrate with Azure AI and other services
3. Architecture – the ability to create and explain 3-tier architecture diagrams, system context diagrams, system interaction diagrams, etc.

Other Professional Experience

• Ability to orchestrate, lead, and influence virtual teams, ensuring successful acceleration and release of customer projects.
• Collaboration and Communication: Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, ability to communicate AI concepts effectively with business, data science and technical audiences, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills.
• Relationship Building: Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with key stakeholders. The ability to influence and build relationships across technical and business teams.
• Good business acumen to quickly understand the customer’s industry and business to have relevant discussions with business decision makers.
• Good understanding of key AI scenarios that are driving innovation in key industries such as financial services, Retail, Healthcare etc.
• Problem Solving: Ability to solve customer’s AI problems through various cloud technologies
• Presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences (Senior Executives, IT Management, Data Scientists, Engineers)

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 and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.