Cloud Solution Architect

OverviewOverviewWe are looking for a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) who is passionate about driving our customers’ application innovation & AI transformation on the Microsoft platform. As part of this role, you will guide customers through their AI adoption journey, helping them design, build, and scale solutions using Azure, GitHub, and Microsoft’s AI stack. You’ll be responsible for technical customer engagements, working with the most challenging and exciting projects within some of our strategic UK customers. This customer-facing position is a hands-on technical role spanning across design, build, and operations with a focus on issue resolution to remove customer technical obstacles and adoption challenges. You will work with customers to lead deep technical architecture discussions and engage with senior customer executives, enterprise architects, platform engineers 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. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home.With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the mission of the Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers achieve their business outcomes faster with technology that does more.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.ResponsibilitiesResponsibilitiesUnderstand customers’ overall Business and IT priorities and success measures for platform engineering, building cloud applications, AI adoption and Low code opportunities. Act as the voice of the customer by driving new feedback into engineering, insights on usage and application patterns and help accelerate solution delivery through Architectural Reviews, Proof of Concepts/MVP applications and environment setup. Support customer skilling by making skilling recommendations or delivering technical discussions, workshops and other cloud readiness activities and ensure that solution exhibits performance, security, scalability, maintainability and reliability upon deployment. Consumption (Cloud & Support) growth - Develop opportunities to drive Customer Success business results & help Customers get value from their Microsoft investments and identify resolutions to Customer blockers by leveraging subject matter expertise and use internal Microsoft processes for escalations to support and engineering. Drive customer/partner relationships to anticipate, identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers to accelerate consumption and solution implementation and proactively use knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations to identify growth opportunities based on knowledge of customer/partner needs. Learn new technologies or services that are aligned to customer needs and common patterns seen in Cloud application development and stay current with the latest Azure, AI and GitHub capabilities, cloud application patterns and be a practitioner of one or more enterprise languages .Net, Python, Java, JavaScript/Node.js, etc. and related frameworks. Share ideas, insights, and strategic technical input with technical teams and internal communities as well as participate in external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and generate new ideas for changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes for designated customers/partners so as to drive opportunities for IP reuse, best practice sharing and consumption acceleration. QualificationsRequired QualificationsBachelor'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 experience This role requires UK Security Clearance, therefore candidates will need to either have existing security clearance or meet the minimum criteria to apply for security clearance. Preferred Qualifications (PQs)Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, 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, or related field AND 6+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting OR equivalent experience Strong years of experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external). Strong years of experience working on technical projects Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications) Experience and expertise in one or more of the following areas: Azure AI Foundry (Models, Agent Service, Semantic Kernel, Search, ML, SDK) AppPlat/Containers/Serverless (App Service, AKS, ACA, ARO, Functions) DevOps (CI/CD, Azure DevOps, DevSecOps) GitHub (Copilot, Enterprise, Adv Security, Actions, Codespaces) This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. 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 with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.