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Microsoft · 1 day ago

Senior Cloud Solution Architect - Cloud & AI Data - CTJ - Secret

United States

Full-time

Remote

Mid, Senior Level

$106K/yr - $204K/yr

6+ years exp

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. They are seeking a Senior Cloud Solution Architect – Cloud & AI Data to join their Federal organization, responsible for delivering cloud solutions and ensuring customer satisfaction while managing technical risks and opportunities.

Application Performance ManagementArtificial Intelligence (AI)Business DevelopmentData ManagementDevOpsInformation ServicesInformation TechnologyManagement Information SystemsNetwork SecuritySoftware

Growth Opportunities

No H1B

Security Clearance Required

U.S. Citizen Only

Responsibilities

Operates according to required operational excellence and proven practice standards throughout all sales stages/activities/tools of record (e.g., pipeline updates, time tracking)

Collaborates across Microsoft and customer/partner teams through on-strategy delivery to achieve customer/partner objectives and increase customer/partner satisfaction

Proactively manages business and technical risks, adapts methodology and applies governance principles to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks

Executes work in compliance with industry and Microsoft guidelines and procedures

Continuously prioritizes among competing demands in their work and identifies where impact occurs with customers, ensuring alignment with business priorities and goals

Delivers solutions in line with company methodologies (e.g., product offerings such as value-based deliverables [VBDs], advice, training, technical validation), ensuring proven practices and patterns are followed to prepare customers for operational readiness and achievement of their business goals and targets

Leveraging knowledge of change management proven practices and/or involving the change management team, proactively helps the customer deploy for long-term organizational adoption to increase customer satisfaction and drive consumption/usage

Guides customers/partners towards a well-architected (e.g., secure, resilient, artificial intelligence [AI]-enabled), and cost- and performance-optimized solution to increase retention and expansion opportunities

Provides feedback to Unified Delivery Team on VBDs to refine and further develop content

Proactively identifies new opportunities for Consumption, Usage & Unified expansion (especially Enhanced Solutions) at scale based on business value to customer/partner and clear understanding of the Microsoft value proposition for supported platforms to empower cloud success, foster and strengthen security and resiliency, and drive AI innovation

Actively listens to and respectfully challenges customers/partners, building trust to then advocate for alternative architectures/solutions/approaches that shape and/or enhance customer requirements

Identifies, and evaluates industry trends (e.g., customer industry verticals, information technology [IT] industry), gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps existing architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes

Proactively captures opportunities in appropriate systems, processes, and tools, working collaboratively across the organization to execute on opportunities aligned with Microsoft's Customer Engagement Model

Proactively identifies, escalates, and mitigates blockers using appropriate tools and processes to accelerate solution deployment, value realization and usage/consumption

Applies business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge to architecture or support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints

Proactively acts as the voice of the customer/partner, sharing ideas, feedback, insights, success stories and strategic/technical input with Engineering teams, Product Offerings teams and internal communities leveraging relevant insights from feedback tools and systems

Identifies patterns of feedback across customers/partners/territories/industries and leverages them to develop strategic and actionable insights

Presents business cases to program managers to influence product roadmaps, decision making, bug fix prioritization, and own and drive initiatives as appropriate

Identifies and/or translates customer/partner problems into industry solutions aligned with Microsoft product and platform strategy, and explains why and/or how they meet customer/partner outcomes and return on investment (ROI) goals (e.g., via proof of concept, minimally viable product [MVP], rapid prototype) relative to competitive offerings

Proactively helps the customer/partner adopt and use Microsoft product/platform strategy-aligned (cross-solution area) solutions

Builds relationships with technical decision makers (TDMs), and helps build the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs)

Independently interacts as needed with customers/partners' Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and other C-level (CXO) roles to bridge understanding of security, compliance, operational and risk requirements across BDMs, TDMs, CIO and CISO teams, appropriately engaging additional subject matter experts when deeper expertise is required

Drives self and guides other team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience

Defines customer/partner conditions of success by leveraging an understanding of customer goals

Anticipates and addresses customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs, and executes strategies to improve customer experience, value realization, and acceleration of transformation

Identifies and prioritizes several opportunities that align with revenue goals, and orchestrates growth of solution utilization pipeline with partners

Provides assistance with partner and sales teams to bring clarity to specific opportunities through proof of concept and technical pre-sales support

Understands solution area-specific market opportunities (e.g., competitor insights) and collaborates with Global Partner Solutions (GPS) business stakeholders to lead and execute initiatives to translate opportunities into actions

Proactively guides and supports partners in developing repeatable offerings, practices, products, and solutions

Advises the partner throughout initial strategic customer implementations

Leverages market insights and demand signals to assist leadership in identifying relevant areas in which to drive up-skilling and/or accreditations based on demand

Role models technical readiness, both depth-aligned to solution area priorities and breadth-aligned to Customer Success Unit (CSU)/corporate initiatives (e.g., security, resilience, AI), and influences team to drive their own technical readiness

Acts as a mentor, leading readiness and upskilling activities in the team/organization by educating colleagues on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing proven practices

Proactively identifies gaps through delivery, communicates those gaps to relevant team members and internal/external stakeholders, and connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas that drive changes and improvements to products, IP (both existing and new), technologies, and/or processes/practices that enable solutions to scale across customers

Contributes to the development and modification of Microsoft's structured frameworks and methodologies

Provides thought leadership and innovation to customers/partners and internal communities at the local level

Contributes to leading virtual teams (v-teams) around technologies and customer/partner challenges, and shares ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape

Demonstrates strong industry knowledge and increases recognition for Microsoft solutions by contributing to and sometimes leading presentations and engagements with external and internal audiences (e.g., Tech Connect, Build, Ignite) Contributes to intellectual property (IP) and identifies patterns where no IP exists (e.g., CoPilot and AI scenarios) to help build scalable and repeatable models

Participates in external technical and non-technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, webcasts, blogs, hackathons) that elevate the Microsoft brand and shares learnings across internal teams

Qualification

Azure OpenAIMachine LearningCloud ArchitectureSQL ServerData GovernanceTechnical CertificationCustomer-facing ExperienceTechnical Project ExperienceCompetitive Cloud KnowledgePartner Ecosystem Understanding

Required

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, 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 experience

Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role

The successful candidate must have an active U.S. Government Secret Security Clearance

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role

Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination

This position requires successful verification of the stated security clearance to meet federal government customer requirements

You will be asked to provide clearance verification information prior to an offer of employment

This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter

This position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions

Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customer and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law

To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport, or other approved documents, or verified US government Clearance

Preferred

Hands-on experience building solutions or POCs with: Azure OpenAI, open-source LLMs, Claude, Gemini, Llama, and/or Mistral RAG or Retrieval Augmented Generation

LangChain or semantic kernel

PyTorch or Tensorflow Machine Learning, including Azure ML Services / ML Flow

Big Data platforms including SQL DW (Synapse), Snowflake, Redshift, Spark (EMR/HDInsight)

Advanced Analytics, including Azure Databricks

Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs including scalability, security and resiliency, database migrations, and cloud technology management

Breadth of technical experience and knowledge, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise (SME) in the following Data Platform Cloud solutions and/or data estate workloads

SQL platforms including SQL Server (Database/Analysis Services), Azure SQL DB, OSS Databases (PostgreSQL), ETL/ELT systems

NoSQL Databases including Azure Cosmos DB, and OSS Databases (Cassandra, Mongo etc)

Visualization tools, including PowerBI

General awareness of Data Governance and Stewardship processes

The technical aptitude, enthusiasm and desire to adapt to change, learn new technologies and understand relevant industry and cloud trends

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 8+ 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, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 6+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting + OR equivalent experience

Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications)

Professional Cloud Certification in one or more of the following technologies preferred: Cloud, Database, Big Data, BI, Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence

4+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external)

4+ years experience working on technical projects

Prior work experience in a Consulting/Architecture position within a software engineering and/or professional services company such as Amazon, VMware, Google, IBM, Oracle, or similar desired

Knowledge of Azure cloud services

General Knowledge of competitive cloud services

Knowledge of enterprise public cloud platforms and related industry/marketplace

Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs