Cloud Solution Architecture (Infrastructure)

Job description

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.

We’re looking for a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) to help customers migrate, modernize and secure their infrastructure, applications, and data on Microsoft Azure, laying the foundation for scalable, production-ready AI solutions.

As part of the Cloud + AI Infrastructure team, you’ll deliver engagements focused on migration, modernization, operational excellence and resilient architecture using frameworks like Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and Well-Architected Framework (WAF).

You’ll leverage existing Repeatable IP and execution engines for critical milestones, ensure infrastructure, application, and database readiness for AI workloads, and ensure successful deployment that accelerates adoption.

You’ll work closely with customer IT leaders to design and implement scalable solutions, resolve blockers, and accelerate adoption of Azure services through repeatable IP and delivery excellence.

With deep expertise across Azure infrastructure, applications, databases, SAP, and hybrid environments, you’ll play a key role in helping customers unlock the full value of their Microsoft Azure investments.

In line with our Flexible Work approach, for roles at Microsoft Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, we recommend spending at least two days per week in the office or at the customer site.

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**

+ 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 (including recommending qualified partners) based on specific technical products or customer project needs.
+ 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/partner skilling and addressing identified capability gaps (e.g., skills, capacities) by delivering as a trusted technical advisor to ensure customer/partner readiness by facilitating technical discussions and adoption of technical best practices (e.g., architecture, well-architectured principles, required technical skills and roles) and enabling operational health and cloud readiness.

Transfers knowledge to customers close customer/partner capability skill gaps, collaborating with peers to address them as appropriate.

May identify partner capability 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 offerings, practices, products, services, solutions, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations to assess customer/partner needs and independently identify growth opportunities (including potentially guiding partners in developing for them).
+ 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 around 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 clarity, design, development, and deployment (including owning engagements with and through partner technical stakeholders) 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).

**Specialty Responsibilities**

+ Gains insight into solution area-specific market opportunities and initiates actions (e.g., reaching out to business stakeholders, obtaining feedback support from more experienced, technical peers) to address them with support from peers and leadership.

Guides partners in developing offerings, practices, products, and solutions.

Assists the partner throughout initial customer implementations.

Delivers technical enablement.
+ Identifies and focuses on opportunities that align with revenue goals.*
+ Drives growth of solution utilization pipeline with partner by unblocking technical blockers in customer deals.
+ Provides support to partner and sales teams to clarify specific opportunities through proof of concept and technical pre-sales support.*

**Qualifications**

**Required/minimum qualifications**

+ Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND solid 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.
+ Fluent in German language (C1-level at minimum)
+ Strong foundation in on-premises Microsoft infrastructure technologies and hybrid cloud integration
+ Deep knowledge of Hyper-V and Windows Server virtualisation, as well as Azure Local.

**Additional or preferred qualifications**

+ Proven experience with Azure Stack HCI / Azure Local architecture, deployment, and lifecycle management.
+ Familiarity with Azure hybrid services, PowerShell automation, and failover clustering.
+ Solid understanding of networking, storage, and security in hybrid environments.
+ Knowledge of Kubernetes (AKS) and containerised workloads.
+ Ability to integrate workloads such as Azure Virtual Desktop and AKS in hybrid setups.

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 (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .

Required Skill Profession

Other General