Digital transformation is impacting every industry around the world. From retail and manufacturing to financial services and healthcare, disruption is already here. Customers across all Industries are asking Microsoft to help them reinvent their business, innovate, and digitally transform to today’s new realities. 

The Retail Industry Team, part of the Worldwide Enterprise Commercial Organization, is accountable for leveraging deep industry and technical expertise to deliver relevant, customized industry solutions and services, built on a secure, integrated cloud platform, to empower our customers to digitally transform their businesses. It’s no longer just about one simple software solution; it’s about creating a connected, secure, efficient, and scalable digital ecosystem.  

We are at one of the most pivotal times in the Retail & Healthcare industry. New levels of connectivity and intelligence, enabled by cloud computing, IoT and AI have elevated companies to unprecedented levels of transformation, productivity and efficiency. As we embrace a rich future of digital empowerment, we are looking for senior level hands-on technical Architect to join the Retail Industry team to help in this transformation for our one of our largest Retail customers.  

Our team culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. We also strive to have fun! 

If you have a passion for customer success and want to be part of creating life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world, we want to hear from you. 

Responsibilities

Microsoft aspires to help our customers achieve their own digital transformation, leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud solutions and services. In this senior hands-on technical architect role you will help lead a comprehensive digital transformation for a global strategic customer in the Chicago area. As one of the program leaders, this exciting role will help fuel the Customer’s success through Azure adoption, retention, and growth. Some of the core responsibilities for this role are: 

Lead client engagements from definition through delivery to ensure technical transformation success for our customers.

Collaborate with enterprise customers to scope and define requirements, architect and design solutions, develop, and deliver transformational, customized industry solutions and services.

Ensure all solutions exhibit high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, appropriate reusability and reliability upon deployment​

Develop deep relationships with key customer decision makers (both Business and IT) who drive long-term innovation and transformation to our customers product roadmap.​ 

Be a Voice of Customer to share insights and best practices, connect with Engineering team to remove key blockers and drive product improvements.​ 

Proactively identify opportunities for integrating modern architecture patterns and emerging technical solutions into the current design

Evaluate, identify, mitigate and eliminate risk, provide guidance, and propose immediate solutions

Comfortable and effective communicator with all stakeholders, including senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, Developers, Data Scientists, and IT Management

Lead deep technical architecture discussions and development of POCs

Work with multiple customers to create Proof of concepts (POCs) / Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) etc. and guide customers to production deployment and operationalization.​ 

Apply technical knowledge and expertise to architect and design solutions that meet business and IT needs, create solution roadmaps, drive POCs and MVPs, and ensure long term technical viability of new deployments, infusing key technologies where appropriate

Collaborate with other Cloud Solution Architects and technology stakeholders to develop complex end-to-end Enterprise solutions.​ 

Create exceptional cross-team collaboration and communication. Partner with all required Microsoft stakeholders and partners to drive role clarity, account coverage, project assignment and effective cross-team collaboration 

Ensure delivery of high-quality production deployments that are resilient and successful 

Coach and enable your team members to accelerate digital transformation program to production, including guidance on architectural design, technical recommendations, blocker escalations, and technical resource orchestration.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

Extensive experience ideating, architecting, consulting, designing, developing, leading, and delivering cloud infrastructure and application platform technology solutions over the entire lifecycle of client-facing large scale, complex enterprise projects

Several years of experience in Core Infrastructure 

Modeling cloud infrastructure based on application scale and capacity needs, providing data-driven recommendations to optimize application architecture and performance 

Use of architectural patterns and anti-patterns for resiliency and geo-availability 

Cloud networking and hybrid connectivity with expertise in BGP and SD-WAN solutions as well as Azure networking services such as Express Route 

Management, monitoring and operations at-scale, preferably in a cloud environment 

Identity and access control with experience administering B2B and B2C applications as well as a working knowledge of Azure AD 

Security and governance with a strong proficiency in defining and modelling security baselines and managing security posture 

Infrastructure-as-Code to build, test and deploy infrastructure for application environments 

Running microservices and container-based workloads in production. 

Open source technologies and frameworks  

 Other Qualifications

Inclusive and collaborative – driving teamwork and cross-team alignment. 

Strong partner relationship management and solution development skills. 

Conversant knowledge of competing platforms and solutions. 

Proven track record of building deep relationships with CXOs 

Strong executive presence including communication and presentation skills with a high degree of comfort to large and small technical audiences. 

Problem solving mentality leveraging internal and/or external resources, conflict resolution, and follow through with partners. 

Orchestration of application development lifecycle. 

Experience in vertical industries, proven by projects/solutions implemented with substantial business processes covering Financial and Insurance, Manufacturing, Consumer Goods, Healthcare/Life Sciences, Retail, or other business to consumer industry scenarios. 

Demonstrable architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of complex application architectures 

Candidates must also demonstrate ability to adapt to new technologies, learn quickly, and understand relevant cloud trends is required.

Travel:  Availability to travel is an integral part of this job once Covid restrictions are released and could be 25 to 50% at times for this role as Azure Architect.  Expected to work on-site with the customer in Nottingham

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.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. 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.