Cloud Solution Architect (Cloud & AI)

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With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers’ expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft’s portfolio of solutions and products. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

The Global Customer Success (GCS) organization, an organization within CE&S, is leading the effort to enable customer success on the Microsoft Cloud by harnessing leading, AI-powered capabilities and human expertise to deliver innovation solutions that accelerate business value, drive operational excellence and nurture long term loyalty.

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 (CSA) with deep expertise in Azure Data, Analytics, and AI services to lead transformative engagements for our customers. In this strategic role, you will drive architectural innovation, implementation excellence, and operational health across Microsoft Azure solutions.

We are looking for candidates that demonstrate business acumen, thought leadership, critical thinking, and negotiation skills with a track record of customer advocacy. The Senior CSA will balance technical and business objectives and will engage and influence senior leaders internally and externally to deliver high quality solutions and user experiences. Effective negotiating, influencing, and leadership skills mixed with creativity and deep subject matter expertise will be essential to achieve strategic alignment of goals across this broad range of stakeholders. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your technical program management 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.

Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, information technology (IT) consulting/support, systems administration, network operations, software development/support, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting

Business Value: The ability to convey the business needs and value of proposed solutions, plans, and risks to stakeholders and decision makers. This includes the ability to persuade and inform based on facts and alignment with goals and strategy.

Trusted Advisership: The ability to build trusted advisor status and deep relationships across stakeholders (e.g., technical decision makers, business decision makers) through an understanding of customer needs and technologies.

Situational fluency: Using self-awareness as a mechanism to interpret verbal and non-verbal cues to increase your ability to "read the room."

Insightful listening: asking insightful questions to understand the customer's needs, issues, business environment and drivers, and going beyond what the customer has said.

Technical:

Breadth of technical experience and knowledge in foundational security, foundational AI, architecture design, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise in one or more of the following:

Enterprise-scale technical experience and depth with one or more areas of the Azure Analytics ecosystem (Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Power BI embedded, Azure Synapse analytics, Azure Analysis Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Data Lake) (required)

Knowledge of Business Intelligence, design and build of Advanced Analytics and Big Data solutions, hands-on experience with data warehousing, Lakehouse architecture, Real time Intelligence, big data, analytics workloads (Azure or equivalent), semantic model development with knowledge of key differentiation to determine best fit for use cases and applications

Experience creating Data & Analytics Proof of Concepts (PoC), Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for customers that lead to production deployments.

Experience with Microsoft Fabric, DAX, T-SQL, PowerShell, C# (in the context of PBI/AS programming), Python (preferable)

Competitive Landscape: Knowledge of key Data & Analytics platforms such as AWS, GCP, Snowflake, etc.

Experience in shipping PySpark enabled data pipelines. Understanding batch, streaming ETL/ELT processing.

Preferred experience/understanding on data lake house, data mesh architectural principles.

Key responsibilities include:

Developing reusable intellectual property (IP) and content assets that scale across field teams, customers and showcase value-based deliverables.

Creating world-class collateral to empower internal field teams in delivering impactful customer outcomes.

Supporting the Customer Success Unit (CSU) and customers in maximizing their Microsoft investments through hands-on architecture and solution delivery.

Customer-Centric Approach:

Identify customers' goals for migrating to Azure, and ensure the program provides Data & Analytics solutions that deliver business value.

Customer Satisfaction - Drive positive Customer Satisfaction & become a trusted advisor. Solicit feedback and understand their experiences with the service delivered.

Ensure that solution exhibits high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, appropriate reusability, and reliability upon deployment.

Customer/Partner Insights - Provide feedback & insights from customers/partners.

Business Impact:

Drive Consumption Growth: Develop opportunities to enhance Customer Success and help customers extract value from their Microsoft investments.

Unblock Customer Challenges: Leverage subject matter expertise to identify resolutions for customer blockers. Identify the opportunities to develop repeatable IPs and integrate with Cloud Accelerate Factory.

Architect modern Data & Analytics Solutions: Apply technical knowledge to design solutions aligned with business and IT needs. Create modernized Data & Analytics platform solutions with infused AI, lead POCs and MVPs, and ensure long-term technical viability.

Technical Leadership:

Advocate for Customers: Share insights and best practices, collaborate with the Engineering team to address key blockers, and drive product improvements.

Continuous Learning: Stay updated on market trends, collaborate with the Data, Analytics and AI technical community, and educate customers about the Azure platform.

Accelerate Outcomes: Share expertise, contribute to IP creation, and promote reusability to accelerate customer success.

Be the Voice of Customer to share insights and best practices, connect with the delivery team to remove key blockers and drive improvements.

Learn It All - Maintain technical skills and knowledge, keeping up to date with market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the Data & AI technical community while educating customers on Azure platform.

Accelerate customer outcomes - Share expertise, contribute to IP creation & re-use to accelerate customer outcomes.

Broad knowledge of Azure Data & AI (Azure Data Factory, Azure Storage, SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Synapse, Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric).

Drive delivery teams to address customer expectations by providing work around and helping customers solve their technical issues as quickly as possible.

Effectively orchestrate and bridge the delivery through cross-functional teams, providing operational guidance to the delivery teams.

Other Professional Experience:

Ability to orchestrate, lead, and influence virtual teams, ensuring successful acceleration and unfreezing of customer projects.

Collaboration and Communication: Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, ability to communicate Analytics and AI concepts effectively with business 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 Data and AI scenarios that are driving innovation in key industries such as financial services, Retail, Healthcare etc.

Problem Solving: Ability to solve customer’s Data problems through various cloud technologies.

Presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences (Senior Executives, IT Management, Architects, Engineers)