Cloud Solution Architect

• Gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs, competitive landscape), and maps architecture and digital transformation solutions to customer/partner business outcomes
• Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving new feedback, insights, and resources across internal teams to add and prioritize
• Represents the customer/partner to internal teams (e.g., Engineering) to shape products and services by providing insights across the territory
• Advocates for the customer/partner at all opportunities and shares customer success stories with the wider internal team
• Guides other team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience
• Supports definition of customer/partner conditions of success
• Anticipates customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs and executes strategies to improve experience, value realization, and acceleration of customer transformation
• Actively listens and respectfully challenges customers/partners when going in the wrong direction, presents insights and alternatives, and takes action appropriately
• Drives customer/partner relationships to anticipate, identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers to accelerate consumption and solution implementations
• Routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party
• Applies broad business and technical knowledge across various architecture or other Microsoft solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints
• Shapes and enhances customers' requirements
• Proactively uses 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
• Contributes to increase in consumption and aligns with Customer Success Account Management or other Account Team members on customer/partner priorities to drive growth in consumption via cost optimization, operational excellence performance efficiency, and security
• Drives architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer/partner usage and consumption
• Ensures that the customer/partner's application has as few points of failure as possible
• Consults and provides thought leadership for technical solution design, development, and deployment and supports the customer/partner throughout implementation to achieve value outcomes and Microsoft's Customer Promise
• Understands industry trends and the competitor's architecture solutions and identifies Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to drive conversations with customers/partners and convince them of solution
• Proactively develops technical and professional learning and development plan in alignment with and support from their manager
• Role models effective technical readiness
• Acts as a mentor and role model to less experienced colleagues to educate them on technical and non-technical concepts
• Participates in development opportunities (e.g., Ready, Build, Ignite)
• Shares ideas, insights, and strategic technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using a thorough knowledge of specific Microsoft products and their context in the competitive landscape
• Participates in external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with the internal team
• Generates new ideas for changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes for designated customers/partners
• Drives opportunities for IP reuse, best practice sharing, and consumption acceleration
• Proactively identifies gaps through delivery and communicating those gaps to others (e.g., Leadership, managed intellectual property [MIP], Design, and Governance)
• Applies subject matter expertise to develop new IP that fills identified gaps

• 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
• Relevant Microsoft 365 technical certification is required
• Strong expertise in Microsoft Teams is mandatory
• Experience with SharePoint Online and Microsoft Intune is preferred

Experience with Microsoft Teams is highly desirable and will be considered a strong advantage, particularly in supporting integrated collaboration and productivity solutions across Microsoft platforms