Cloud Solution Architect Manager

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft’s products and services, ignited by our people and culture. We drive cross-company alignment and execution, ensuring that we consistently exceed customers’ expectations in every interaction, whether in-product, digital, or human-centered. CE&S is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft’s portfolio of solutions and products. Come join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

We are looking for a Cloud Solution Architect Manager for Cloud and AI Data (Data CSA Manager), who will be expected to drive rigor in the people agenda, curate a high-performance culture, and enhance "Tech intensity" by fostering a continuous learning environment and promoting innovation within your team. You will be a transformative leader, responsible for driving our customers' success. Leading a team of Cloud Solution Architects (CSA), you will provide strategic guidance and valuable insights on how our customers can efficiently evolve their business outcomes and solution portfolio using Microsoft technologies and diverse solution areas. You will model, coach, and care for your team, fostering a high-performance culture of excellence. Your deep technical expertise across solutions will establish your credibility, while your ability to create and lead a top-tier team through robust hiring practices, talent retention strategies, coaching, and mentoring will drive performance excellence.

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

People Management

• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.
• Model - Live our culture; Embody our values; Practice our leadership principles.
• Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn.
• Care - Attract and retain great people; Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations; Invest in the growth of others.

Customer Centricity​

• Understand customers’ overall system landscape, Business and IT priorities and success measures to design public cloud solutions that drive business value.
• Customer Satisfaction - Drive positive Customer Satisfaction & become a trusted advisor.​
• Ensure that solution exhibits high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, appropriate reusability, and reliability upon deployment.
• Customer/Partner Insights - Provide feedback & insights from customers/partners.​

Business Impact​

• Consumption (Cloud & Support) growth - Drives adherence to Microsoft standards and recommended practices by setting expectations for the team around methodology and governance to ensure that the team identifies, communicates, and minimizes business and technical risks. Ensures governance of technical work, including robust architectures that are validated and delivered in line with best practices. Ensures that teams leverage standard tools to maintain accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.
• Drives the team to apply business and technical capabilities in 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 and customer outcomes. Identifies patterns in blockers across business areas or a territory. Coaches team on best practices for handling escalations.
• Manages the business (e.g., sales pipeline, forecasting) by delivering against team targets, achieving business metrics, and ensuring the team delivers on Microsoft's Customer Promise. Holds teams accountable for proactively using deep knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations and for developing new solutions to scale across multiple customers/partners while demonstrating the business case and presenting alternative scenarios. Coaches team to lead solution design, resilience reviews, and technical optimization that results in production deployment application and that increases customer/partner usage, consumption, and target metrics. Creates opportunities to expand or accelerate cloud consumption and coaches the team to lead these customer/partner conversations. Works across teams to seek out and leverage Microsoft insights that strengthen and fuel new commercial growth and consumption. Influences senior and complex partners to grow or scale the business with strategic/high-potential opportunities.
• Provides team with a holistic perspective of customer/partner challenges, industry trends, and competitor architectures to allow team members to engage with customers/partners, demonstrate Microsoft's value, and develop counter strategy.

​Technical Leadership ​

• Fosters a continuous technical self-learning culture and community sharing of stories by encouraging and empowering the team to share learnings, and by establishing a cadence (e.g., internal technical brainstorming calls, presenting latest challenges in staff meetings) to calibrate on challenges and trends that impact the team and other peer teams. Leverages market insights to assist leadership in defining area vision by identifying relevant areas in which to drive up-skilling. Contributes to technical strategy for the business. Role models effective technical readiness and influences team to drive their own technical readiness. Drives and engages others to adapt to changes aligned with solution areas/services priorities, and encourages team to build skills relevant to their market. Acts as a mentor to colleagues by educating them on technical and non-technical concepts and sharing best practices. In partnership with the learning lead, removes blockers to support learning across teams.
• Models how to engage constructively and transparently with the technical and/or business community locally and globally. Participates in management communities (e.g., manager excellence community) to evolve adaptive engines of change and foster a culture of fast and effective learning at all levels. Provides coaching to enable team members to lead 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. Fosters collaboration across teams (e.g., account teams, product teams) and solution area communities. Drives recognition for Microsoft solutions through technical and business presentations and engagements with internal and external audiences.
• Accelerates innovation by coaching teams on building and/or modifying intellectual properties (IPs) rooted in domain expertise and/or industry acumen. Coaches the team to connect gaps and patterns across business and technology areas, and drives changes and improvements to existing IP, technologies, and/or processes that enable solutions to scale across customers/partners, and drives opportunities for IP reuse and best practice sharing.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications (Rqs/Mqs):

• 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 Business Applications consulting OR equivalent experience.
• English: Daily conversational level
• Japanese: Business level

Additional or Preferred Qualifications (PQs)

• Business Value: The ability to convey the business needs and value of proposed solutions, plans, and risks to stakeholders and decision makers. This includes the ability to persuade and inform based on facts and alignment with goals and strategy.
• Trusted Advisership: The ability to build trusted advisor status and deep relationships across stakeholders (e.g., technical decision makers, business decision makers) through an understanding of customer needs and technologies.
• Situational fluency: Using self-awareness as a mechanism to interpret verbal and non-verbal cues to increase your ability to "read the room."
• Insightful listening: asking insightful questions to understand the customer needs, issues, business environment and drivers, and going beyond what customer said.
• 6+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• 3+ years people management experience, including managing consultant practice managers, technical sales managers, and/or technical architect managers.

Technical

• Passion for technology and customer obsession.
• Enthusiasm towards leading technologies and motivation to learn and grow.
• 5+ years experience leading technical projects, teams, or functions.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).
• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge in foundational security, foundational AI, architecture design, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise for the specific technical workloads, i.e., Windows Server, Linux server, network, storage, database, data warehouse, AI/ML, BI, AKS, ARO, containers, VMware, Azure Virtual Desktop, application technologies like .NET, Apache, JBoss, RedHat OpenShift, Java.

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. 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.