Cloud Solution Architect, App Innovation

Opportunities available: Standard | Senior | Early In Career

With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft’s end-to end customer experience. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers come to us not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, but also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience. Enterprises are going through fundamental shifts in application development primarily driven by changing work force’s, growing need for digital experiences and shortage of developers' skills in the industry.

We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate App Innovation Architect focusing on Azure Application Innovation to join the Customer Success Unit. This customer-facing position is a hands-on technical role spanning across design, build, and production with a focus on issue resolution to remove customer technical obstacles and adoption challenges.

As part of this role, you will be responsible for technical customer engagements, working with the most challenging and exciting projects within Microsoft <Area> customer base. You will work with select customers to lead deep technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, IT Management and Developers. You will collaborate with a variety of internal and external teams to develop pilots and oversee implementation projects, ensuring technical blockers are removed on adoption. You will drive technical intensity of developers and create communities within customers. And you will collaborate with Product engineering to share feedback into the development of Microsoft products and help develop Azure platforms.

Are you someone, who believes in making software development accessible to all? Would you love to help us accelerate customer’s digital transformation? Are you ready for the opportunity to change the world one application at a time? If so, join us as we define the future! The ideal candidate will have experience in customer-facing roles and success leading deep technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, IT Management and Developers.

Responsibilities

Key responsibilities include:

• Understand customers' overall applications portfolio, IT and business priorities and success measures to design implementation architectures and solutions (Microsoft and 3rd party solutions) using PaaS, DevOps & Advanced Application coding
• Apply technical knowledge and customer insights to empower customers to create a modernization journey roadmap. Architect solutions to meet business and IT needs, ensuring technical viability of new projects and successful deployments, while orchestrating key resources and infusing key Infrastructure technologies including Kubernetes, Azure PaaS services (e.g. App Service, Java, containers, serverless, cloud native, etc.) and Application Development with low code options and DevOps and GitHub technologies as appropriate
• Collaborate with other Cloud Solution Architects and MS stakeholders in developing complex end-to-end Enterprise solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform.
• Ensure all solutions exhibit “Well-Architected” framework, such as high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, and appropriate reusability and reliability upon deployment
• Run Architectural Design Session to build plan for implementing solution –governing design in line with customer business goals and their technical environment. Outcome is consensus on solution design and next steps toward production.
• Develop deep relationships with key customer IT decision makers, who drive long-term cloud adoption within their company to enable them to be cloud advocates
• Be the Voice of the Customer; Share insights and best practices, and connect with Engineering teams to remove blockers
• Trouble shoot technical issues to prove value of implementation of Azure technologies
• Assess the Customers' knowledge of Azure platform and overall cloud readiness to support customers through a structured learning plan and ensure its delivery through partners
  • Collaborate with others in developing complex end-to-end Enterprise solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform
• Maintain technical skills and knowledge of market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the technical community
  • Be an Azure Platform evangelist with customers, partners and external communities
• Build and grow developer communities by driving activities including OpenHacks, Workshops

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Demonstrable success in consultative/complex technical sales and deployment projects, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of highly distributed applications
• Relationship Building. Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with senior IT executives in large or highly strategic accounts. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects.
• Problem Solving. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies
• Collaboration and Communication. Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to orchestrate, lead, and influence virtual teams, ensuring successful implementation of customer projects. Presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences (Senior Executives, IT management, Administrators and Developers)

Technical

• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management
• Experience and understanding of large-scale application portfolios in enterprise-wide environments (including migration of on-premise workloads to the cloud)
• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud native app hosting through software design, development, deployment and app refactoring/migrations
• Web application server technologies, cloud application design, software architecture and practices; (design/development/deployment, Agile, SCRUM, ALM)
• Experience with scalable architectures using Azure App Service, API management, serverless technologies, container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry etc.), API management, microservice frameworks, SDKs etc.

Preferred Qualifications

• Software development practices like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Visual Studio)
  Competitive Landscape. Knowledge of cloud development platforms
  Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs
  Experience with low-code/no-code development platforms like PowerApps
• Education - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field
• Certification in one of the following technologies preferred: Cloud, web application development, cloud-native application architecture (i.e. containers, microservices, API management), modern software development techniques like DevOps and CI/CD tool chains (i.e. Jenkins, Spinnaker, Azure developer services, GitHub) and container orchestration systems (i.e. Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Azure Kubernetes Service, GitHub)
• Certification in one or more of the following programming languages preferred: C++, C#, Java, Node.js, Python

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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. 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.

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