Cloud Solution Architecture - Application Innovation

Overview
With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the mission of the Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. Come join CE&S 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 Digital and Application Innovation Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) who is passionate about driving our customers’ Application Innovation & AI transformation on the Microsoft platform. As part of this role, you will be responsible for technical customer engagements, working with the most challenging and exciting projects within Microsoft Azure and GitHub customer base. This customer-facing position is a hands-on technical role spanning across design, build, and operations with a focus on issue resolution to remove customer technical obstacles and adoption challenges. You will work with customers to lead deep technical architecture discussions and engage with senior customer executives, enterprise architects, platform engineers and developers. You will collaborate with a variety of internal and external teams to develop pilots and oversee implementation projects, ensuring technical blockers are removed on adoption. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% 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
     Customer Centricity

• Understand customers’ overall Business and IT priorities and success measures for platform engineering, building cloud applications, AI adoption and Low code opportunities.
• Act as the voice of the customer by driving new feedback into engineering, insights on usage and application patterns and help accelerate solution delivery through Architectural Reviews, Proof of Concepts/MVP applications and environment setup.
• Support customer skilling by making skilling recommendations or delivering technical discussions, workshops and other cloud readiness activities and ensure that solution exhibits performance, security, scalability, maintainability and reliability upon deployment.

Business Impact

• Consumption (Cloud & Support) growth - Develop opportunities to drive Customer Success business results & help Customers get value from their Microsoft investments and identify resolutions to Customer blockers by leveraging subject matter expertise and use internal Microsoft processes for escalations to support and engineering.
• Drive customer/partner relationships to anticipate, identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers to accelerate consumption and solution implementation and proactively uses knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations to identify growth opportunities based on knowledge of customer/partner needs.

Technical Leadership

• Learn new technologies or services that are aligned to customer needs and common patterns seen in Cloud application development and stay current with the latest Azure, AI and GitHub capabilities, cloud application patterns and be a practitioner of one or more enterprise languages .Net, Python, Java, JavaScript/Node.js, etc. and related frameworks.
• Share ideas, insights, and strategic technical input with technical teams and internal communities as well as participate in external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and generate new ideas for changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes for designated customers/partners so as to drive opportunities for IP reuse, best practice sharing and consumption acceleration.

Qualifications

Required/ Minimum Qualifications:

• 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
• OR equivalent experience.
• This role requires proficiency in written, reading, and conversational English as all business operations as well as customer communications are conducted in English.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications:

• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise in two or more of the following Digital and Application Innovation Cloud solutions is required:
• Experience and understanding of large-scale application portfolios in enterprise-wide environments (including migration of on-premises workloads to the cloud).
• Extensive technical experience with cloud-native application hosting through software design, development, deployment, and application refactoring/migrations.
• Familiarity with scalable architectures using Azure App Service, API management, serverless technologies, Azure functions and logic apps, container orchestration and Kubernetes.
• Proficiency with software development practices and DevOps using CI/CD tool chains (i.e., Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub).
• Knowledge of cloud development platforms
• Technical aptitude and experience to learn new technologies and understand relevant cloud trends is required.
• Competitive Landscape: Knowledge of cloud development platforms is preferred.
• Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs is preferred