Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of 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. You can help us to achieve our mission.

With over 15,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Experience and Success (CEnS) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of the Microsoft end-to-end customer experience. This newly expanded organization reflects the Microsoft ambition to be known as a customer experience company, ensuring our Microsoft mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more is enabled by delighting customers and consistently exceeding their expectations in every interaction through a connected customer experience.

Microsoft has a tremendous opportunity to exceed customer expectations and drive greater customer loyalty and trust, which leads to greater satisfaction, retention, and growth. The CEnS organization is looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success to help us build a future where customers come to us, not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, and also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience that is rooted in our commitment to delivering on customer outcomes.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities
The Customer Architecture Team is a highly technical team that operates globally and is responsible for:
1) Working directly on our most strategic customer projects worldwide to ensure their High Priority projects are successful on our cloud platform across all industries, with a special focus on designing and helping customers to build production applications.

2) Producing high quality technical and architectural guidance across Microsoft’s Cloud platforms and Industry offerings for internal and external communities, scaling though the sharing of best practices worldwide.

3) Providing a positive impact to the strategic direction of Microsoft engineering teams by ensuring they fully understand the end to end technical details of their services through the eyes of our customers.

4) The development and mentorship of technical delivery personnel within the Customer Success organization.
Travel
There may be up to 50% travel for this role as Cloud Solution Architects are sometimes expected to work on-site with customers, with an occasional need to be in Redmond WA to engage directly with the broader Customer Architecture Team and relevant engineering teams.
Cloud Solution Architects are remote workers that can be based across different Microsoft locations or home offices depending on individual circumstances.

Qualifications

Qualifications
The ideal candidate will have a breadth of knowledge across Azure and cloud computing topics, as well as specialist hands-on expertise in topics from one or more of the technical areas below:
Application Development
• Engineering distributed applications within architectural scenarios such as Web and IoT.
• Programming languages such as C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java and Python.
• Designing scalable solutions on Azure with focus on performance and resiliency.
• Application design patterns, and anti-patterns, such as MVC, CQRS or SAGA.
• Implementing messaging patterns and application integration techniques and technologies.
• Interacting with and querying databases and/or NoSQL datastores.
• Application monitoring and end to end telemetry.
• Implementing microservice architectures.
• Containers for packaging application deployment units and interacting with container-orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes and Service Fabric.
• Defining CI/CD pipelines to automate test and release across different application environments using concepts such as Blue/Green and Canary deployments.
• Source code management using Git or other source control technologies such as TFS.
• Open source technologies and frameworks.
Infrastructure
• Modelling 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.
• Application migrations for scenarios involving components such as Windows/Linux VMs, databases, NFS/SMB file shares, and VDI.
• 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.
• Infrastructure-as-Code to build, test and deploy infrastructure for application environments.
• Running microservices and container-based workloads in production.
• CNCF projects and open source technologies.
Data and Analytics
• Relational database development and optimization across SQL Server and OSS database technologies.
• Open source relational database technologies such as MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL; preferably in the context of Azure Database.
• Azure Cosmos DB with an understanding of how to achieve scalability and availability.
• Working with structured and unstructured data in Big Data scenarios using technologies such as Azure Synapse, Snowflake, Big Query, Redshift and similar data lake concepts.
• Advanced Analytics using technologies such as Synapse Spark or Databricks.
• Developing streaming workloads using technologies such as Spark streaming, Flink, Kafka streams and Storm.
• Visualization tools such as PowerBI, Tableau and Qlik.
• Data governance, logging and lineage.
• Data Science deployments and the use of frameworks such as Pandas and TensorFlow.
• Machine Learning, preferably using Azure ML and ML Server.
• Artificial Intelligence, preferably using Azure Cognitive Services and the Microsoft Bot Framework.

Candidates must also exhibit a technical propensity to learn new technologies and stay abreast of Microsoft Cloud Platform advancements and understand relevant trends.

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.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.