Cloud Solution Architecture

Responsibilities

Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment

• Identifies and evaluates industry trends (customer industry verticals, information technology [IT] industry), gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes. Adapts business models, plans, and solutions to insights.
• Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving new feedback, gaps, blockers, insights, resources, etc. across territories to track, add, and prioritize, using established channels (e.g., UAT/TFT). Represents the customer/partner to internal teams (e.g., Engineering) to shape products and services by providing insights across the territory.

Architecture Design and Deployment

• Leverages and champions an existing architecture approach to achieve Microsoft’s agreed commitments to the customer/partner. Proposes and develops new solutions to scale across multiple customers/partners while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios.
• 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 them with win-win technical architecture(s) and demonstrates and proves the capability and business value of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.
• Applies broad technical, industry, and enterprise knowledge to architecture projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints. shaping and enhancing customers’ requirements.
• Leads customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture(s) to enable a breadth of highly advanced and complex solutions. Provides thought leadership for technical architecture design, development, and deployment and supports/drives the customer/partner throughout pre-sales and/or implementation.
• Anticipates, identifies, and removes technical blockers (e.g., changing configurations, sample coding) through regular technical reviews and check ins to accelerate architecture implementations. Anticipates and routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party.
• Adapts methodology and applies governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks (e.g. Well-Architected Framework, Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, Cloud Adoption Framework). Defines customer/partner conditions of success, adheres to quality assurance, and calculates risks while designing and/or delivering solutions.

Practice Development

• Connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas, and drives changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and/or processes that enable solutions to scale across customers. drives sales and consumption, as well as IP re-use and best practice sharing. Develops and contributes to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies.

Trusted Advisor

• Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner/MCS architects, C-level technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders (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). Influences partners in technical and architectural areas.
• Creates and sustains constructive tension and trust with customers/partners by respectfully challenging their decisions and/or areas where they might do more and encouraging them to consider alternative architectures and approaches.
• Leads the adoption of Microsoft architecture technologies based on analysis/differentiation of Microsoft and competitor products to influence the industry-wide direction for specific architecture(s).

Thought Leadership

• Leads virtual teams around technologies and customer/partner challenges by sharing ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape. Acts as a mentor to multiple peers and leads initiatives to improve processes and drive efficiency.
• Participates in external architect community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with internal team. Acts a mentor to junior colleagues by educating them on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing best practices. Demonstrates deep industry knowledge and drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences.

Customer Usage

• Leads architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization across multiple applications for the customer, resulting in production deployment application and increased customer business value. Leads initiatives to ensure that the customer’s environment and applications are well-architected.

Qualifications

Required Experience – Education, Key Experience, Knowledge and Skills:

Professional 

• Professional Experience. Proven years of success in consultative/complex technical sales and deployment projects, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of Cloud and/or hybrid computing environments Required
• Relationship Building. Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with senior IT executives in large or highly strategic accounts. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects. Required

• Problem Solving. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies Required
• Collaboration and Communication. Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills. Ability to orchestrate, lead, and influence virtual teams, ensuring successful implementation of customer projects. Presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences (Senior Executives, IT management, Administrators and Developers) Required

Technical 

• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management Required
• Experience with management of cloud infrastructure solutions (i.e. Windows and Linux IaaS, SAP, VMware, BCDR, Security, Management, Storage, Networking, OSS, containers, HPC, and Infra as a code technologies) Required
• Experience with Identity/Security (Azure): Identity, Security Architecture, Security Management and Network Security Required
• Experience and understanding of large-scale application portfolios in enterprise-wide environments (including migration of on-premise workloads to the cloud) Required
• Experience with scalable architectures using Azure App Service, API management, serverless technologies, container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry etc.), API management, microservice frameworks, SDKs etc. Required
• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud native app hosting through software design, development,
• Deployment and app refactoring/migrations Preferred

• Software development practices like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Visual Studio). Preferred
• Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of cloud development platforms preferred. Preferred
• Web application server technologies, cloud application design, software architecture and practices; (design/development/deployment, Agile, SCRUM, ALM) Preferred
• Partners. Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs Preferred

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field preferred
• Certification in one of the following technologies preferred: Cloud Infrastructure, Data Analytics, Networking, Security, cloud-native application architecture (i.e. containers, microservices, API management), modern software development techniques like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure developer services, GitHub) and container orchestration systems (i.e. Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Azure Kubernetes Service, GitHub)
• Certification in one or more of the following programming languages preferred: C++, C#, Java, Node.js, Python

Experience

• Prior work experience in a Consulting/Architecture position within a software and/or services company