Senior Cloud Solution Architect - Azure Core - job 2 of 2

We are seeking passionate individuals to join our Customer Success teams across various business groups, working with a diverse range of customers within our enterprise, regulated, and partner services organizations.As a Senior Cloud Solution Architect - Azure Core, you will work closely with Microsoft’s strategic partners to help them achieve their business goals by fully leveraging their Microsoft technology investments. With your deep technical expertise, you will lead critical technical discussions, ensuring partners unlock the full potential of Microsoft solutions while resolving any challenges that could impede customer success. This role presents an excellent opportunity to grow your career, enhance your technical and collaboration skills, and expand your cloud expertise.Azure is the most comprehensive, innovative, and flexible cloud platform available today, and Microsoft is looking for talented professionals to drive cloud adoption among the world’s most important companies. We are driven by curiosity and a commitment to continuous learning. We embrace uncertainty, take bold risks, and learn quickly from our experiences. Collaboration is at the heart of what we do—we build on each other’s ideas because we are stronger together. We are inspired by what people can achieve and are motivated every day to empower others to accomplish more through our technology and innovation. Together, we make a lasting impact.Microsoft’s mission is to empower every individual and organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we embrace a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to achieve our collective goals. Every day, we uphold our core values of respect, integrity, and accountability, fostering a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive both at work and in life.ResponsibilitiesCustomer Centricity:• Gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs) and leverages these insights and existing plans to map solutions with customer/partner business outcomes. Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving awareness of existing feedback, insights, and resources with internal teams to add and prioritize. Shares customer success stories with the wider internal team.• Identifies and begins developing impactful relationships with internal teams and customer and partner technical specialists during initial preparation and ramp-up stages. 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. Understands how work aligns with customer success plan and meets customer/partner needs by working with internal teams to deliver customer outcomes. Supports customer skilling by delivering as a trusted technical advisor to ensure customer readiness by facilitating technical discussions and enabling operational health and cloud readiness. Transfers knowledge to customers close customer skill gaps.• Contributes to customer satisfaction by providing a positive customer/partner experience. Demonstrates an understanding of customer/partner conditions of success. Identifies dissatisfied customers and builds remedial actions (e.g., post-mortem reviews).• Actively listens and respectfully challenges customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalates appropriately.Business Impact• Independently identifies issues and advises customers/partners to operate and optimize performance in accordance with Microsoft best practices. Escalates issues to senior team members or manager, as needed. Applies methodology and governance to minimize business and technical risks and adhere to quality assurance while ensuring excellence in contributions to design and/or delivery of solutions. Adheres to quality assurance standards and calculates risks while ensuring excellence in the design and/or delivery of solutions. Leverages standard tools to ensure accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.• Independently works with the customer to identify, determine root causes, and resolve blockers to accelerate consumption and solution implementation (e.g., by application of technical capabilities). Identifies non-technical issues and escalates for removal by the appropriate party. Applies business and technical knowledge of architecture or other Microsoft solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints. Helps to shape and enhance customers' requirements.• Leverages knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations to assess customer/partner needs and independently identify growth opportunities. Leverages an existing architecture approach or reference architecture to propose a solution or achieve Microsoft's Customer Promise. Identifies opportunities to expand or accelerate consumption (e.g., cloud and support). Participates in discussions about architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer/partner usage and consumption. Independently consults on technical solution design, development, and deployment and supports the customer/partner throughout implementation to achieve value outcomes and Microsoft's Customer Promise.• Understands the competitor's architecture solutions and identifies Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to demonstrate Microsoft's value to customers/partners.Technical Leadership• Leverages development opportunities (e.g., mentorships, role-based resources, trainings, internal events such as Ready, Build, Ignite) to learn new technologies and services as advised by leadership team/manager.• Shares ideas, insights, and technical input with virtual team members using a working knowledge of specific Microsoft architectures and other relevant products. Participates in external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with the internal team.• Supports research projects and contributes to scoping surveys for customers/partners to assess potential intellectual property (IP) needs or process changes. Supports identification of opportunities for IP reuse and consumption acceleration. Contributes to IP creation and updates by identifying gaps through delivery and communicating those gaps to others (e.g., Leadership, managed intellectual property [MIP], Design, and Governance).Other• Embody our culture and valuesQualificationsRequired/Minimum Qualifications:• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 4+ years 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 experienceOther Requirements• Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role’s job duties.Additional Or Preferred Qualifications• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 12+ years 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 Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 8+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting• OR equivalent experience.• 6+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).• 6+ years experience leading technical projects.• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, certifications).Cloud Solution Architecture IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $103,800 - $200,300 per year.There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $133,700 - $219,200 per year.Cloud Solution Architecture IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $129,200 - $248,800 per year.There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $162,000 - $268,900 per year.Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: US corporate pay information | Microsoft CareersMicrosoft will accept applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis.Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.