Customer Solutions Architect

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 achieve our mission. 

The Microsoft AI Co-Innovation laboratories in Business Development provide a unique environment for partners and customers in artificial intelligence, global automation, and robotics, to rapidly ideate and prototype their future technologies through rapid iterations of engagements, either onsite or virtually. 

This role in the AI, Data and Emerging Technologies Business Development organization provides an exceptional opportunity to manage delivering corporate level governance for highly strategic growth opportunities with internal and external stakeholders, alliance formations, ecosystem development and help pioneer customer engagements with responsibility for the solution architecting and the hands-on operations of the AI Co-Innovation laboratories. 

We are looking for an experienced Customer Solutions Architect, who has hands-on proficiency in designing, developing, and deploying Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence solutions for our Business Partners. We are looking for individuals who are thought leaders in the realm of AI/Data Science, have thorough understanding of Statistical & Stochastic Modeling, Deep Learning, Cloud Architectures, Foundation Models (SLM, LLM) & Traditional ML Models, and can drive results by leading from the front while also mentoring the team and other AI Engineers within the organization. The ideal candidate will play a critical role working with other senior Product Managers, Software Engineers, and Architects across Microsoft to identify opportunities, collaborate and deliver impact. You will be working on curating, designing, architecting, developing, and deploying AI and ML solutions that drive cost and business efficiency, and are futuristic! 

This position is based in Redmond, but the candidate will be expected to travel to the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Lab in Wisconsin, headquartered on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus about 25-50% of their time. The candidate will work alongside Microsoft's partners in Wisconsin, serving as a catalyst for manufacturers across Wisconsin, showcasing the vast possibilities AI offers and leading hands-on exploration and prototyping.

Responsibilities

• Elicit, design, and develop scalable, reliable, cloud-native AI/ML products – Foundational & Traditional ML Models. 
• Be inquisitive, understand data & data imputation techniques, perform hypothesis testing, evidence based statistical & stochastic modeling, analysis & insights and able to find/discover the story in the data sets and provide a coherent narrative about key data insights.​ Transform the insights into intelligence. 
• Apply best practices of cloud-native AI/ML model development, leverage relevant libraries/APIs, feature engineer, principal component analysis, choose the right model for a given domain/business problem context. 
• Write performance & cost-efficient modular code and drive end-to-end life cycle of ML Model development to solve complex problems and create innovative solutions.  
• Communicate effectively with stakeholders and present technical vision and solutions to small to large audiences.  
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to the team and foster a culture of collaboration, excellence, and growth mindset. 
• Rapid agility with Proof of Concepts, especially with emerging technologies, concepts and frameworks in AI and ML.  

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Collaboration: Work with cross-disciplinary teams to drive strategic customer/partner projects to a success through the lab program.
• Influence: Ability to influence and drive results in a complex technical and business environment, including various stakeholders across functions (such as engineering, business development, Microsoft for Startups, marketing, sales, services, finance and legal). Learn to additionally influence external stakeholders across corporate and partner organizations.
• Execution: Demonstrated track record of owning projects or programs from early concept design through tracking of key results. This includes defining objectives and coming up with new ways to scale impact over time.
• Agility: Ability to contribute consistently and positively in a high-paced, fast-changing, ambiguous, and sometimes unpredictable work environment.
• Customer Obsessed: Brings a customer and partner first mindset and knowledge of technology, start-ups, and corporate innovation to authentically engage senior executives and drive results.
• Key interpersonal traits: Motivation, creativity, adaptability, curiosity, continuous learner, resourcefulness, unquestionable ethics & integrity, exemplary organizational skills and high attention to detail.
• The ability to quickly and clearly understand and articulate new technologies and business value to others.
• Some business or technical experience with cloud computing, application development, and machine learning/AI principles.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Supply Chain, or related field AND 4+ years experience in technical program/product management, coding, software development/delivery work
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of customer-facing experience.
• 4+ years of experience designing and developing AI solutions in cloud environments

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Supply Chain, or related field AND 8+ years experience in technical program/product management, coding, or software development/delivery work
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of customer-facing experience- understanding and curating strategic business transformations and innovation initiatives deeply. Translate Business Issues and requirements into AI architectures. Augment value propositions for business through AI Interventions – AI strategies, interventions, programs, and engagements. Partner with Business/PM Stakeholders for Demand Generation.
• 8+ years of experience in Data Science/AI/ML development, with a proven track record of delivering highly scalable, observable, and secure AI products. With experience in ML/Data Science frameworks and toolkits such as scikit-learn, PyTorch, NumPy, Pandas, OpenCV, Keras, TensorFlow, and/or Matplotlib.
• 5+ years of experience architecting Data/AI/ML solutions- navigate through Data Science Lifecycle, Statistical Model Building - Descriptive, Predictive, Prescriptive, AI/ML System Design & Architecture, Sampling, Feature Engineering, Dimensionality Reduction, Principal Component Analysis, Supervised, Unsupervised & ML Techniques & Models. 
• 2+ years of professional experience with Natural Language Processing, Traditional & Foundation Models (LLM, SLM), Vector Databases, Retrieval Augmented Generation, Opinion & Sentiment Analytics, Forecasting, Recommendation Systems, Anomaly Detection,  XGBoost, Random Forest, and/or Ensemble Modeling .
• 5+ years of experience developing solutions in the cloud using tools such as AzureML, Azure AI Platform, Databricks, and/or Azure Cognitive Services. 

Customer Solutions Architecture IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $117,200 - $229,200 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $153,600 - $250,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until December 24, 2024.

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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