Overview
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, a theme of 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 to achieve our mission.
Microsoft aspires to help our customers achieve their own digital transformation, leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud solutions and support offerings. To this end, Microsoft invests in a dedicated Customer Success team that will help Microsoft customers successfully realize their business outcomes.
With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the mission of the Customer Success Unit (CSU) organization is to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products, services, and partnerships. Come join CSU and help us build a future where customers achieve their business outcomes faster with technology that does more.
We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) focusing on Azure Infra to join our diverse and inclusive Customer Success Unit team!
Responsibilities
Customer Centricity
- Anticipates industry trends (customer industry verticals, information technology [IT] industry) and gathers customer/partner technical insights to position the organization to deliver architectures that account for changing landscapes and key priorities. Leverages insights to influence long-term technology strategy and influences others to focus and adapt architectural models, plans, and solutions to align with key insights and drive consultative solution selling. Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by championing feedback around technical capabilities, blockers, and insights and drives the resolution of existing items. Represents the customer/partner to internal teams (e.g., Engineering) and mentors peers on best practices around internal resource usage. Contributes to Microsoft-centric operations and cadences to align with customer/partner feedback. Uses broad patterns of feedback to develop strategic and actionable insights and presents a compelling business case to program managers that influence product roadmaps and decision making. Drives customer/partner advocacy and sharing success stories with the wider internal team.
- Is the Chief Technical Office (CTO)-level leader who drives technical leadership and executive engagement. Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects, C-level technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders for large and high-impact customers/partners (to the extent that the customer/partner will call for consultation without being prompted). Provides direction to TDMs and builds the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Uncovers, aggregates, and synthesizes data about customer/partner business, complex technical requirements and issues (e.g., involving great length or tenacity to resolve), and various technical strategies being proposed. Addresses requirements/issues/strategies with win-win technical architecture(s), and demonstrates and proves the capability and value of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. Contributes to and understands how works aligns with customer success plan and proactively anticipates and delivers customer outcomes by developing strategic partnerships with internal teams. Supports customer skilling by leading discussions on technical delivery with other internal and external stakeholders as a technical domain expert to influence customer readiness.
- Acts as a role model to identify trends and proactively propose solutions that drive transformative delivery across customers/partners. Models a seamless and connected customer experience. Proactively shares these best practices so others can leverage and scale. Leads definition of customer/partner conditions of success. Anticipates customer/partner unmet needs and dissatisfaction and creates strategies to improve experience, value realization, and acceleration of customer transformation.
- Actively listens, creates, and sustains constructive tension and trust with customers/partners by respectfully challenging their decisions and/or areas where they might do more. Builds on their network and industry experience to connect customers/partners with ideas, people, and resources to support their success.
Business Impact
- Drives their team to operate and optimize complex and high-impact situations for customers/partners in collaboration with internal stakeholders (e.g., Customer Services and Support, Customer Success Account Management, other Account Team members, Product Groups). Anticipates and manages business and technical risks, and outlines methodology and governance principles and practices for the broader organization that allows others to minimize risks. Adheres to quality assurance standards and calculates risks while ensuring excellence in the design and/or delivery of solutions. Leverages standard tools and may assess or help to develop novel tools to ensure accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.
- Integrates insights across complex customers/partners to resolve blockers and proactively create workaround strategies to circumvent complex or escalated technical blockers and unmet customer needs through regular reviews and check-ins to drive customer acceleration. Develops processes to support anticipation and routing of non-technical issues for efficient removal by the appropriate party. Applies business, technical, industry, and enterprise knowledge across multiple, large architecture or support projects to meet strategic and tactical business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified organizational constraints. Drives efforts to shape and enhance customers' requirements.
- Proactively uses expert knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations and to influence the shape of new solutions to scale across multiple customers/partners and markets while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios. Acts as an industry expert and optimizes to drive customer/partner usage across domains, technology areas, and business areas. Drives increase in consumption and aligns with Customer Success Account Management or other Account Team members on customer/partner priorities to drive growth in consumption via cost optimization, operational excellence performance efficiency, and security. Creates opportunities and drives complex engagements (e.g., regional, worldwide initiatives, cross-cloud) to expand or accelerate cloud consumption and leads these customer/partner conversations. Leads architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization across multiple customers/partners' entire application portfolios, resulting in production deployment application and increased customer/partner usage and consumption. Ensures that the customer/partner's applications have as few points of failure as possible. Influences partners to grow or scale the business with strategic/high-potential opportunities. Provides subject matter expertise and insight to drive technical solution design, development, and deployment and supports the customer/partner throughout implementation to achieve value outcomes and Microsoft's Customer Promise.
- Leads the adoption of Microsoft technologies based on insight to all major customer/partner projects and analysis/differentiation of Microsoft and competitor products in complex and high-risk scenarios to influence the industry-wide direction for specific architecture(s) or offering(s).
Technical Leadership
- Engages as a technical advisor and business advocate toward the improvement of the solution area. Provides thought leadership by sharing deep insight and driving critical decisions that impact Microsoft and the industry. Leverages market insights to partner with leadership in defining global vision by identifying relevant areas in which to drive internal development. Influences community to drive technical readiness. Acts as a mentor to less experienced colleagues by educating them on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing best practices.
- Leads the direction that internal team members and stakeholders take with customers/partners by sharing ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input across boundaries, and actively pursues opportunities that grow impact and capabilities of the broader organization. Presents at internal events (e.g., Ready, Build, Ignite). Initiates and drives external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons). Serves as an industry-leading expert and drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences, publishing white papers around key technical topics, and driving programmatic execution and scale motions.
- Anticipates and addresses organization- and industry-wide gaps, patterns, and needs, and drives changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and/or processes to scale across global customer/partner businesses and markets. Drives consumption acceleration, as well as IP reuse and best practice sharing, through others. Leads the development and modifications to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies. Proactively identifies gaps through delivery, communicates those gaps to others (e.g., Leadership, managed intellectual property [MIP], Design, and Governance), and leverages business experience to prioritize efforts. Drives strategy for new IP and partners with MIP, Design, and Governance to improve IP.
Qualifications
Required/Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 10+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consultingOR equivalent experience.
- Hands-on, deeply technical knoweldge at Azure.
Additional or Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 15+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consultingOR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 12+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
OR equivalent experience.
- 8+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
- 8+ years of experience leading technical projects.
- Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).
