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.
We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate **Cloud Solution Architect (CSA)** focusing on Azure Data&AI Services to join our diverse and inclusive Customer Success Unit team At our company, we value and celebrate the unique perspectives and contributions of individuals from all backgrounds, including Women, Black, LGBTQ+, and individuals with disabilities. This customer-facing position will use all its hands-on technical experience spanning across design, build, and operations to remove customer technical obstacles and adoption challenges, leading and orchestrating all technical resources necessary for the evolution and completion of the project with the best possible success for the customer.
**Responsibilities**:
Customer 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.
- 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).
**Qualifications**:
**Required/Minimum Qualifications**
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 2+ 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 consultin