Digital Cloud Solution Architect

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.

The Small, Medium, and Corporate team helps businesses achieve their digital transformation goals by matching customer challenges with Microsoft solutions. Located in either a Digital Sales center, or a local subsidiary, you will help our managed customers across industries, company sizes and territories to identify their needs and opportunities. One of the fastest growing customer segments in the technology industry, you will help customers get to the cloud across Microsoft solution areas like Modern Workplace, Business Applications, Applications and Infrastructure, and Data and AI.

The Cloud Solution Architect team consists of highly capable individuals that drive Microsoft wins on the latest cloud and modern development technologies. As a Cloud Solutions Architect, your primary responsibilities will be to engage with customers, partners and your account team to understand the businesss needs, and then prove and design customer business solutions that leverage the Microsoft Cloud for Business with a focus on Microsoft Azure Data and AI services. You will own technical and solution envisioning around data platform and analytics with customers via Microsoft Teams including demos, solution designs, proof of concepts, and implementation.

Responsibilities

Scale Customer Engagements

• Engages with customer technical decision makers and anticipates customer needs and issues proactively through data gathering. Utilizes information on customer business, industry, needs, competitive landscape and key priorities to support customer's digital transformation, challenge them when necessary, and position the customer to deliver architectures; keeps up to date with customer information, industry and market trends, and compliance regulations.

• Uses knowledge of customer context and solution or portfolio expertise to build credibility with customers individually or at scale; develops technical and market/industry knowledge.

• Ensures technical wins for core technologies by driving technical discussions with customers; improves customer interactions through feedback and observation.

• Engages other internal resources (e.g., roles, Microsoft Technology Center [MTC], demo sites, virtual sites), mapping out and leveraging foundational resource knowledge for key areas of technology as needed to overcome technical blockers on assigned technology set.

Scale Through Partners

• Engages in partner sell-with scenarios by collaborating with partners to carry out technical engagement activities.

• Shares competitive insights from customer sessions with colleagues and escalates/resolves competitive situations to influence compete strategies.

• Identifies and applies existing demonstration assets; demonstrates and oversees demonstrations (e.g., Architectural Design Sessions [ADSs], Proof of Concept [POC] sessions) of solutions based on specific Microsoft products through initial engagements; leverages partner/customer teams as needed to prove capabilities and integration into customer environment. Reviews partner demonstrations and provides feedback to ensure alignment with Microsoft standards.

• Collaborates with team members to monitor and analyze customer usage of key/prioritized Microsoft solutions/products that support customers business outcomes; identifies opportunities to promote usage.

Architecture Design and Deployment

• Proposes viable solutions based on specific technical products; demonstrates complex concepts and proves the capability of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.

• Contributes to pilots and proof of concepts for technical solutions to prove the proposed architecture design.

• Supports customer/partner projects as a subject matter expert in a specific architecture solution and throughout pre-sales and/or implementation.

• Identifies technical blockers (e.g., changing configurations, sample coding) for selected products to accelerate architecture implementations, and routes non-technical issues for removal by appropriate party.

• Applies methodology and governance, as directed, to minimize business and/or technical risks and adhere to quality assurance whilst contributing to design and/or delivery of solutions. Demonstrates an understanding of customer/partner conditions of success.

Driving Customer Success

• Builds aligned customer timelines with sponsors to establish concrete success measures around people, process, and technology, and identify customer's specific financial priorities.

• Acts as the Voice of the Customer (VOC) by driving awareness of new feedback, blockers, insights, resources, etc., (e.g., OneList, End Customer Investment Funds [ECIFs]) across communities so they can be added and prioritized.

• Identifies new workloads through understanding of financial value to customer and collaborates with sales team or partners to drive new engagements. Builds and leads strategic conversation between Microsoft cloud solutions, partner, customer business, and information technology (IT) objectives; articulates design and technical planning as well as customer gains and liabilities. Demonstrates an understanding of partner footprint and map of territory; establishes relationships with co-partners.

• Executes according to rhythm of business, identifies opportunities for optimization in rhythm of business, and brings insights to drive success of Microsoft cloud solutions by orchestrating their own milestones within engagements; drives One Microsoft mindset.

Technical Leadership

• Consumes and leverages readiness materials (technical and professional) to expand domain knowledge. Expands awareness of and begins practicing digital transformation sales methodologies (e.g., challenger sales).with customers, partners, and senior colleagues.

• Shares ideas, insight, and strategic-technical input with team members, when asked, using a thorough knowledge of specific cloud solutions and their context in the competitive landscape; provides thought leadership using architecture knowledge.

• Participates as a member in the Microsoft tech community, attends community calls, sessions, hackathon, etc., and acts as a resource for their technology area. Participates in external architect community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups) and shares learnings with internal team

• Ensure customer technical teams are aware of and leveraging available skilling programs. Supports group training or one-to-many events (e.g., workshops, Webinars) to present and train customers and colleagues on the capabilities and benefits of specific Microsoft solutions/products. Initiates, plans, and ensures delivery of cloud training program for customer technical teams based on current and future needs.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• 3 years technical architect, technical consulting, design and implementation, and/or technical sales experience

• OR relevant certifications from Microsoft or competitive platforms AND 1 year(s) technical architect, technical consulting, design and implementation, and/or technical sales experience

• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology (IT), Engineering, or related field AND 2 years technical architect, technical consulting, design and implementation, and/or technical sales experience

• OR equivalent experience.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Azure Data Engineer Certified or Azure Database Administer Certified

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology (IT), Engineering, or related field AND 5 years technical architect, consulting, design, and implementation, and/or sales experience

• OR equivalent experience.

• 3 years experience with cloud-based solution designs, migrations and management of technology.

• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge, with depth/subject matter expertise in two or more of the following data platform cloud solutions required:

• SQL including OSS (PostgreSQL, MySQL etc), Azure SQL

• NoSQL Databases including OSS (MariaDB, MongoDB, etc), Cosmos DB

• Big Data Analytics including Azure Synapse (Azure SQL Data Warehouse), Snowflake, Big Query, Redshift

• Advanced Analytics including Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Spark, visualization tools such as PowerBI, Tableau

• Data Governance

• Data Science

• Machine Learning, including Azure ML, ML Server

• Artificial Intelligence, including Bot framework, Azure Cognitive Services

• Understanding in cloud computing technologies, platforms, business drivers, and emerging computing trends

• Experience in consultative technical selling approach, including bringing innovative ideas to customer problems

• Strong negotiation, organizational, presentation, technical product demo, and written and verbal communication skills to influence key technical decision makers, influencers, senior executives, industry decision makers, and/or boards

• Success-driven, work well in a diverse team, and enjoy a dynamic and changing environment

• Experience and passion for learning (technical and professional skills); implementing practices from others; trying, failing, and learning from experiences; sharing practices and knowledge with others for their benefit

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Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form ([ Link removed ] - Click here to apply to Digital Cloud Solution Architect .

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.