Cloud Solution Architecture M6

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Date posted

Jul 17, 2025

Job number

1846537

Work site

Up to 50% work from home

Travel

0-25 %

Role type

People Manager

Profession

Customer Success

Discipline

Cloud Solution Architecture

Employment type

Full-Time

As a senior leader within Microsoft’s Cloud & AI organization, the Manager of manager (M2) role is pivotal in driving customer transformation through technical excellence, strategic execution, and people leadership. This role leads teams of Cloud Solution Architects (CSAs) aligned to one or more Azure solution areas—such as Infrastructure, Data & AI, or Digital App Innovation—ensuring delivery excellence and accelerating customer outcomes across modernization, AI innovation, and data unification initiatives.

This individual will be accountable for translating Microsoft’s cloud strategy into tangible customer impact by orchestrating high-value engagements, removing technical blockers, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and inclusion. With deep technical fluency and executive presence, this role partners closely with sales, engineering, and delivery teams to shape and scale secure, resilient, and AI-ready solutions.

About the Customer Success Unit (CSU)
The CSU is Microsoft’s engine for realizing customer value post-sale. It plays a critical role in the “Realize Value” and “Manage & Optimize” stages of the customer lifecycle—ensuring adoption, usage, and business impact. CSU teams, including CSAs and Customer Success Account Managers (CSAMs), work hand-in-hand with customers to drive cloud consumption, improve solution health, and accelerate innovation. CSU also leads Microsoft’s AI transformation at scale, acting as a trusted advisor and delivery partner across industries and geographies.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND proven experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
  • OR equivalent experience.
• People management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, technical architect managers, and/or people managers.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
  • OR 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.
• Experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• Experience leading technical projects, teams, or functions.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).
• People management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, technical architect managers, and/or people managers.

People Management

• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.
• Model - Live our culture; Embody our values; Practice our leadership principles.
• Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn.
• Care - Attract and retain great people; Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations; Invest in the growth of others.

Customer Centricity

• Provides support and guidance for their team anticipating trends (e.g., industry, technology) and gathering customer/partner technical insights to develop strategy and execution plans that account for changing landscapes and key priorities. Leverages customer insights to influence key customer relationships. Influences others to focus and adapt architectural models, plans, and solutions to align with key insights and drive consultative approach with customers/partners. Represents the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner through escalation across broader teams and with customers, with emphasis on feedback/insights and removing blockers to accelerate value. Represents the customer/partner to internal teams (e.g., Engineering) and mentors peers on best practices around internal resource usage. Drives and ensures team alignment with Microsoft-centric operations and cadences. Leverages team insights and broad patterns of feedback to develop strategic and actionable insights that influence product roadmaps and business decision making. Drives customer/partner advocacy and sharing success stories and learnings with the wider internal team. Connects and communicates economic, business, and technology trends shaping relevant industries.
• Supports team in developing and expanding existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects, C-level technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders for large and high-impact customers/partners. Provides coaching on how to build the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Drives team to facilitate effective customer/partner conversations and demonstrate and prove the capability and value of solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. Provides real-time coaching in live customer scenarios to improve team performance and gather insights across customer interactions. Understands how the team's work aligns with customer success plan and drives the team to proactively anticipate and deliver customer outcomes by developing strategic partnerships with internal teams. Builds a strong relationship with peers globally by actively participating in account planning, consumption and support planning, and resource planning. Ensures employees are equipped with the capabilities and means to and oversees others to support customer/partner skilling and identified capability gaps (e.g., skills, capacities) and identify solution/product gaps and provide technical domain expertise in technical delivery scenarios with other internal and external stakeholders to influence customer/partner readiness and adoption of technical best practices (e.g., architecture, well-architectured principles, advanced technical skills and roles across multiple areas, developing technical development plans, targeted action plans). May leverage expansive knowledge of partner porfolio to select and champion the most qualified partners to fulfill complex customer project needs. Seeks out opportunities to contribute to One Microsoft strategies, role modelling collaboration and accountability.
• Drives team to provide thought leadership in identifying trends and proactively proposing solutions that drive transformative delivery across customers/partners. Drives a seamless and connected customer experience. Proactively shares best practices so others can leverage and scale. Leads team(s) to clearly define customer/partner conditions of success. Drives customer health within the territory and accelerates unified support contract coverage where applicable. Anticipates customer unmet needs and dissatisfaction and oversees the creation and execution of strategies to improve experience, value realization, and acceleration of customer transformation. Orchestrates and oversees transformative delivery across strategic/high potential customers/partners and proactively shares these best practices so others can leverage and scale. Champions the creation of strategies that improve customer/partner experience.
• Actively listens and acts as a catalyst to create and sustain constructive tension and trust with customers, partners, and internal stakeholders by respectfully challenging their decisions and/or areas where they might do more. Builds on network and industry experience to connect customers/partners with ideas, people, and resources to support their success. Drives team to execute customer/partner engagements leveraging the challenger mindset.

Business Impact

• Drives adherence to Microsoft standards and recommended practices by setting expectations for the team around methodology and governance to ensure that the team identifies, communicates, and minimizes business and technical risks. Ensures governance of technical work, including robust architectures that are validated and delivered in line with best practices. Ensures that teams leverage standard tools to maintain accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.
• Drives the team to apply business and technical capabilities and integrate 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. Identifies widespread or global patterns in blockers and develops strategies to resolve and prevent them in the future. Coaches team on best practices for handling escalations. May provide insight to de-escalate risks in customer compete scenarios.
• Manages the business (e.g., scorecards, forecasting) by delivering against team targets, achieving business metrics, and ensuring the team delivers on Microsoft's Customer Promise. Holds teams accountable for proactively using expert knowledge of the offerings, practices, products, services, solutions, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations and for influencing the shape of new solutions to scale across multiple customers/partners and markets while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios. Coaches across team(s) to lead solution clarity, design, resilience reviews, and technical optimization (including with and through partner technical stakeholders) that results in production deployment application and that increases customer/partner usage, consumption, target metrics, and overall Microsoft health. Optimizes to drive customer/partner usage across technology areas and business areas. Creates opportunities and coaches the team to drive complex engagements (e.g., regional, worldwide initiatives, cross-cloud) to expand or accelerate cloud consumption and leads these customer/partner conversations. Works across teams and organizational boundaries to seek out and leverage Microsoft insights that strengthen and fuel new commercial growth and consumption. Influences senior and complex partners to grow or scale the business with strategic/high-potential opportunities, ensuring support throughout implementation phases as necessary.
• Drives awareness across all levels of the organization of customer/partner challenges, industry trends, and competitor architectures to allow team members to engage with customers/partners, demonstrate Microsoft's value, and develop counter strategy. Holds team accountable for leading the adoption of Microsoft technologies.

Technical Leadership

• Fosters a continuous technical self-learning culture and community sharing of stories by encouraging and empowering the team to share learnings, and by establishing a cadence (e.g., internal technical brainstorming calls, presenting latest challenges in staff meetings) to calibrate on challenges and trends that impact across teams. Engages as a technical advisor and business advocate toward the improvement of the solution area. Provides thought leadership by sharing deep business 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 and targeted and market-relevant up-skilling across teams. Influences community to drive technical readiness. Acts as a mentor to colleagues by educating them on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing best practices. Proactively partners with the country/subsidiary learning lead to resolve issues and blockers and drive learning across teams.
• Models how to engage constructively and transparently with the technical and/or business community locally and globally. Participates in management communities (e.g., manager excellence community) to evolve adaptive engines of change, foster a culture of fast and effective learning at all levels, and support and provide management best practices to peers. Leads the direction that internal team members and stakeholders take with customers/partners by facilitating the dissemination of ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input across boundaries, and actively pursues opportunities that grow impact and capabilities of the broader organization. Drives collaboration across teams (e.g., account teams, product teams) and solution area communities. Drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through technical and business presentations and engagements with internal and external audiences, and by driving programmatic execution and scale motions.
• Accelerates innovation by coaching teams on building and/or modifying intellectual properties (IPs) rooted in domain expertise and/or industry acumen. Anticipates and addresses organization- and industry-wide gaps, patterns, and needs, and drives changes and improvements to existing IP, technologies, and/or processes to scale across global customer/partner businesses and markets while driving opportunities for IP reuse and best practice sharing through others. Leads the development and modifications to the company stock of structured frameworks and methodologies. Drives strategy for new IP and partners with managed intellectual property (MIP), Design, and Governance to improve IP.

Other

• Embody our culture and values