Digital Cloud Solution Architect (D-CSA) - Digital Native

Are you excited about Microsoft Azure? We work with customers to help them achieve their business priorities and help guide customers in their Cloud & AI transformation journey. We also support customers in evaluating their applications and business requirements, recommend solutions that meet their requirements, and demonstrate these solutions to win technical decisions. Microsoft believes that Digital Native Startups and Unicorns have the potential to change the world. These companies are transforming e-commerce, fintech, social media, gaming, and more. They have given us cutting edge applications that are changing the way we live and work. With Microsoft Cloud, we aspire to empower every Startup and Unicorn to innovate and scale our platform, and to grow through our regional ecosystem of customers, developers, partners and investors. You will also have an opportunity to work cross-collaboratively while living our shared IPS Culture priorities: Diversity and Inclusivity, Wellbeing, Sustainability, and Learning. If you have been described as customer obsessed and have a passion for digital-first solutions, we invite you to learn more about our organization and the value we deliver to our customers, partners, and one another, every day.

We are looking for a Digital Cloud Solution Architect (D-CSA) who is passionate about driving our customers’ application innovation & AI transformation on the Microsoft platform. As part of this role, you will be responsible for technical customer engagements, working with the most challenging and exciting projects within Microsoft Azure and GitHub customer base. 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.  

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.

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities include:

• Gather customer insights to map solutions and services with customer business outcomes. Identify opportunities to improve customer solutions and position services to help customers to achieve their objectives.
• Help accelerate solution delivery and adoption through Value Based Deliveries and repeatable Intellectual Property IP).
• Support customer skilling by delivering technical discussions, workshops, etc. that enable operational health and cloud readiness. Contribute to customer satisfaction by providing a positive customer experience.

• Identify opportunities to drive consumption and grow business with existing customers by initiating conversations, providing demos or quotes, and collaborating with partners or internal teams (e.g., Technical Sales Professionals, Global Black Belts). For licensing transactions and project engagements, ensures rapid and robust deployment plan at point of sale that is validated by services and partners.

• Identify opportunities to expand and accelerate cloud consumption, drive business results, and help customers get value from their Microsoft investments in alignment with the Customer Success Account Management team or other Account team members.

• Business Value. Ability to utilize tools such as the Azure Pricing Calculator, Azure ROI Tool, and Azure TCO Tool to generate consumption project cost estimates and demonstrate Cloud economic value to customers, is preferable.

• Share ideas, insights, and strategic technical input with technical teams and internal communities. Participate in external technical community events and generate new ideas for changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes. Drives opportunities for IP reuse, best practice sharing, and consumption acceleration as well as obtain relevant accreditations and certifications.

The candidate will have depth knowledge in one of the below areas while having breadth knowledge of the other two areas:

Apps and AI:

• Critical to maintain and grow expertise in AI Foundry & App architecture (Agentic AI framework, TensorFlow, Pytorch, Responsible AI) and App architecture/cloud native dev (APIs, containerization, microservices, event-driven).
• Important to maintain and grow expertise in AI Management & Security (Gen AI Ops, Sentinel, orchestrator, monitoring).
• 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 DevOps/GitHub capabilities and practices, cloud application patterns and be a practitioner of one or more enterprise languages .Net, Java, JavaScript/Node.js, Python, etc. and related frameworks.
• Identify issues and advises customers to operate and optimize performance in accordance with Microsoft best practices and resolve customer blockers to accelerate consumption by leveraging technical expertise and knowledge of Microsoft solutions, escalate to support and engineering as appropriate.

Data

• Critical to maintain and grow expertise in Fabric Data Platform, DW, real-time intelligence, BI, Purview and Azure Databases: SQL DB, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL.
• Important to maintain and grow expertise in on-prem EDW appliance (Teradata, Netezza, Exadata), Hadoop & BI migration, and Azure Databricks

Infra:

• Build trusted advisor relationship with customers’ technical decision makers (TDMs and TDM-1) and use proactive effort to find and understand customers’ pain points and work together with customers to co-develop secure & resilient solution architecture for production scale delivery using Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) best practices including Unified Support and Cloud Migration Factory (CMF) for Opensource workloads offer for every opportunity.
• Overcome competitors and technical objections and manage customer escalation with Global Black Belt and engineering team to share insights and best practices for product improvements.
• Critical to maintain and grow expertise in Cloud Migration (Linux, PGSQL, App workloads, resiliency, security, compliance).

Qualifications

Required Qualifications (RQs) 

• Bachelor'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
• Fluency in Japanese and English

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
• 4+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external)
• 4+ years experience working on technical projects
• Technical experience and knowledge in Enterprise-scale, technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management. Proficient in .Net, Java, JavaScript/Node.js or Python development languages and related frameworks
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications)
• Data Azure Certifications: DP-600 Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate or DP-700 Fabric Data Engineer Associate or DP-420 Azure Cosmos DB Developer or DP-203 Azure Data Engineer Associate or DP-300 Azure Database Administrator Associate
• Apps Azure Certifications: AI-102 Azure AI Engineer Associate or AZ-204 Azure Developer Associate or AZ-400 DevOps Engineer Expert
• Azure Certifications: AZ-305 Azure Solutions Architect Expert or AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate or AZ-700 Azure Network Engineer Associate or AZ-500 Azure Security Engineer Associate or AZ-800 Administering Windows Server Hybrid Core Infrastructure

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.

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