Cloud Solution Architect – Infrastructure

1. Location–Espoo, Uusimaa, Finland
2. Company–Microsoft
3. Job Type–Hybrid, Full-time
4. Experience level–Mid-senior level

About the job

With over 17,000 employees worldwide, the mission of the Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers achieve their business outcomes faster with technology that does more.

In the Customer Success team, we are looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success. As a Cloud Solution Architect – Azure Infrastructure, you will enable customers to achieve their outcomes, based on their investments in Microsoft technology. Leveraging your leading technical expertise, you will ensure customers get value from their MS investments.

Microsoft aspires to help our customers architect and deploy first-class cloud infrastructure solutions in Azure to be AI-ready by applying scalable best practices in the cloud with Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and Well-Architected Framework (WAF). Azure is the most comprehensive, innovative, and flexible cloud platform today and Microsoft is hiring professionals that will drive customer cloud adoption for AI Innovation within the most important companies in the market.

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

Technical Leadership

• Leads virtual teams around technologies and customer/partner challenges by sharing ideas, insights, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using knowledge of Microsoft architectures and their context in the competitive landscape. Organizes or presents at internal events (e.g., Ready, Build, Ignite). Demonstrates deep industry knowledge and drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through presentations and engagements with external audiences. Participates in external technical community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings across internal teams.
• Connects gaps and patterns across business and technology areas, and drives changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and/or processes that enable solutions to scale across customers/partners. Drives consumption acceleration, as well as IP reuse and best practice sharing. Develops and contributes to the company’s stock of structured frameworks and methodologies. Proactively identifies gaps through delivery, communicating those gaps to others (e.g., Leadership, managed intellectual property [MIP], Design, and Governance), and leveraging business experience to prioritize efforts. Drives strategy for new IP and collaborates with MIP, Design, and Governance to improve existing IP.
• Leverages market insights to assist leadership in defining global vision by identifying relevant areas in which to drive up-skilling. Role models effective technical readiness and influence the team to drive their own technical readiness. Drives and engages others to adapt to changes aligned with solution areas/services priorities. Acts as a mentor to less experienced colleagues by educating them on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing best practices.
  

Customer Centricity

• Identifies and evaluates industry trends (customer industry verticals, information technology [IT] industry), 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 territories 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. Leverages feedback to develop strategic and actionable insights and presents business cases to program managers to influence product roadmaps and decision-making. Share customer/partner success stories with the wider internal team.
• Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects, C-level technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders (to the extent that the customer/partner will call for consultation without being prompted). Provides direction to TDMs and builds the bridge between TDMs and business decision makers (BDMs). Uncovers, aggregates, and synthesizes data about customer/partner business, complex technical requirements and issues (e.g., involving great length or tenacity to resolve), and various technical strategies being proposed. Addresses requirements/issues/strategies with win-win technical architecture(s) and demonstrates and proves the capability and value of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. Contributes to and understands how works aligns with customer success plan and deliver customer outcomes by driving partnerships with the appropriate internal teams/resources. Supports customer skilling by leading discussions on technical delivery with other internal and external stakeholders as a technical thought leader to influence customer readiness.
• Actively listens, creates, and sustains constructive tension and trust with customers/partners by respectfully challenging their decisions and/or areas where they might do more and encouraging them to consider alternative architectures/solutions and approaches.
• Guides other team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Drives definition of customer/partner conditions of success. Anticipates customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs and helps create strategies to improve the experience, value realization, and acceleration of customer transformation.
  

Business Impact

• Leads the adoption of Microsoft offerings based on analysis/differentiation of Microsoft and competitor products to influence the industry-wide direction for specific architecture(s).
• Drives their team in operating and optimizing complex and high-impact situations for strategic customers/partners in collaboration with internal stakeholders (e.g., Customer Services and Support, Customer Success Account Management, other Account Team members, and Product Groups). Anticipates and manages business and technical risks, adapts methodology and applies governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks. Adheres to quality assurance standards and calculates risks while ensuring excellence in the design and/or delivery of solutions. Leverages standard tools to ensure accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.
• Proactively uses deep knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations and to propose and coach others to develop new solutions to scale across multiple customers/partners while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios. Optimizes to drive customer 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.
• Creates opportunities to expand or accelerate cloud consumption (including through cloud-related managed intellectual property [MIP]) and leads these customer/partner conversations. Leads architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization across multiple applications for the customer/partner, resulting in production deployment applications and increased customer/partner usage and consumption. Ensures that the customer/partner’s applications have as few points of failure as possible.
• Provides thought leadership to help drive technical solution design, development, and deployment and supports the customer/partner throughout implementation to achieve value outcomes and Microsoft’s Customer Promise.
• Owns complex customer/partner relationships to anticipate, identify, propose resolution, and lead removal of technical blockers through regular technical reviews and check-ins to accelerate consumption and solution implementations. Anticipates and routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party. Applies broad business, technical, industry, and/or enterprise knowledge to architecture or support projects to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified constraints. Shapes and enhances customers’ requirements.
  

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Fluency in English is essential.
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 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.
• Experience working in a customer-facing role, working with executives and managing various stakeholders (e.g., internal and/or external).

Additional Or Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience leading technical projects.
• Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solutions/projects and the ability to influence and build relationships across technical and business teams.
• Deep domain knowledge in Data Center Migration, PaaS, virtualization and VMware, Networking, identity management, Security, Storage, BCDR, Resiliency, Infrastructure as Code (IaaC), automation, Hybrid and Arc.
• Experience creating a cloud adoption framework that leads to a successful customer production deployment.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).
• Experience with Azure technologies and services such as Azure migration, containers, Apps and data cross solutions with infrastructure.
• Knowledge of SRE, SDLC, DevOps and GitHub.
• Experience deploying and administering SAP/RISE in cloud environments

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