Cloud Solution Architect - Data & AI

In Microsoft, Small Medium Enterprise & Channel (SME&C) team, we are looking for people with a passion for delivering customer success. As a Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) - Data & AI reporting to the Cloud Solution Architect Manager you will enable SMC (Small, Medium, and Corporate) customers & Partners to achieve their business outcomes, based on their investments in Microsoft technology. Leveraging your leading technical team’s expertise, you will drive the team to ensure customers get value from their Microsoft investments. 

In this role you will adapt business models, plans, and solutions to insights. Act as the voice of the customers (VOC)/partners across communities to add and prioritize. Leverages and champions an existing architecture approach to achieve agreed commitments to the customer/partner. Demonstrate and prove solutions capability and value. Apply broad technical knowledge across various architecture solutions to meet requirements and resolve identified constraints. Lead customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture. Identify, escalate, and work to resolve technical blockers and route non-technical issues for removal. Adapt methodology and apply governance to minimize business and technical risks. Generate new ideas for changes and improvements. Develop and expand existing impactful relationships with stakeholders. Respectfully challenge customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalate appropriately. Identify Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to convince customers of solution. Share ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with internal teams using a thorough knowledge of specific Microsoft products and their context in the competitive landscape. Participate in external architect community events and share learnings with the internal team. Lead architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer usage/Azure Consumed Revenue. The CSA drives delivery execution through preparedness, precision delivery, overall utilization, and high customer satisfaction in a cost-efficient manner. 

We are looking for a highly motivated and technically skilled Cloud Solution Architect (CSA) who specializes in data platforms Advanced Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence to help customers build secure, scalable, and AI-ready solutions on Microsoft Azure. This customer-facing role is responsible for driving technical strategy, architecture design, and deployment of data and AI solutions, ensuring long-term customer success and Azure consumption growth. 

As part of the Cloud + AI Data team, you’ll leverage existing Repeatable IP and execution engines with accountability to drive delivery excellence, accelerate adoption, and ensure a successful deployment for the customer for services such as Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, OpenAI, Cosmos DB, Purview. You’ll collaborate with different teams across Microsoft, share best practices, and stay current with evolving trends to help customers unlock the full value of their data and AI investments.   

The ideal candidate has a strong background in enterprise architecture, cloud technologies, and customer collaboration. 

Your Role And Impact:

• Strategic Guidance: Engage with customers & partners to understand their goals and challenges, then provide strategic solutions that maximize the value of their Microsoft technology investments.  
• Technical Leadership: Lead in-depth technical discussions, offering insights and recommendations to overcome complex challenges in data and AI initiatives both On-premises (SQL Server) as well as in Azure.  
• Empowering Customers: Support customers in achieving successful outcomes by developing tailored solutions that drive their digital transformation and innovation.  
• Continuous Growth: Leverage this opportunity to advance your career while enhancing your knowledge and skills in cutting-edge cloud technologies.  

This role is flexible in that you are required to work 3 days / week in-office. 

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

• You will develop relationships with key customer IT and business decision makers, to understand their data estate, priorities, and success measures, and design secure, scalable Data & AI solutions that deliver measurable business value.  
• You will understand customers’ overall data estate Business and IT priorities and success measures to design Data & Analytics solutions that drive business value and drive positive Customer Satisfaction & become a trusted advisor.   
• You will ensure that solution exhibits high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, appropriate reusability, and reliability upon deployment and provide feedback and insights from customers/partners.  
• You will develop opportunities to drive Customer Success business results & help Customers get value from their Microsoft investments and identify resolutions to Customer blockers by leveraging subject matter expertise. Deliver according to MS best practices & using repeatable Intellectual Property (IP).  
• You will apply technical knowledge to architect and design solutions that meet business and IT needs, create Data & Analytics roadmaps, drive Proof of Concepts (POC) and Minimal Viable Product (MVP), and ensure long term technical viability of new deployments, infusing key AI technologies where appropriate.  
• You will maintain technical skills and knowledge, keep up to date with market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the AI technical community while educating customers on Azure platform.  
• You will accelerate customer outcomes - Share expertise, contribute to IP creation & re-use to accelerate customer outcomes and obtain relevant accreditations and certifications. Proactively identify gaps through delivery and communicating those gaps to others (e.g., Leadership, managed intellectual property [MIP], Design, and Governance). Applies subject matter expertise to develop new IP that fills identified gaps  
•  Drive Azure consumption through accurate and complete Azure Consumption Plans and support Unified/Factory delivery models. 
• Lead technical workshops, build MVPs, and guide customers through production deployments. 
• Collaborate with internal teams to remove blockers and share customer feedback. 
• Evangelize Azure technologies within customer, partner, and community ecosystems. 
• Own the end-to-end technical delivery results, ensuring completeness and accuracy of consumption and customer success plans in collaboration with the Customer Success Account Managers.  
• Provide delivery oversight and escalation support for key consumption engagements across Data & Analytics workloads.  
• Drive technical excellence by leading the health, resiliency, security, and optimization of mission-critical data workloads, ensuring readiness for production-scale AI use cases.  
• You will identify resolutions to issues blocking go-live of migration and modernization projects by leveraging Azure Infrastructure technical subject matter expertise and lead technical conversations with customers to drive value from their Microsoft investments and deliver all work according to MS best practices and policies.  
• You will demonstrate a self-learner mindset through continuous alignment of individual skilling to team/area demands and Customer Success goals as you accelerate customer outcomes and engage in relevant communities to share expertise, contribute to IP creation, prioritize IP reuse and learn from others to help accelerate your customers transformation journey.  
• Be accredited and certified to deliver with advanced and expert-level proficiency in priority workloads including Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, Microsoft Purview, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Cosmos DB.  

Technical Leadership

• Design the solution using your Data Platform technical knowledge, architectural approach, consultancy skills and our methodology to win a customer’s technical decision and meet the customer’s needs; drive proof of concepts (POCs)/production deployments to create momentum for MVPs, infusing key AI technologies where appropriate and being technically proficient to do POC with hands-on-skills.   
• Data Platform technologies, including SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Cosmos DB, as well as Analytics, Data Warehousing, and Data Engineering scenarios. Focus on Intelligent Data and Analytics Platforms such as Synapse, Lakehouse architecture, Fabric, Azure Databricks, and Power BI. Stay informed on market trends and competitive insights and actively collaborate and share knowledge within the Data & AI technical community.  
• Experience in Azure architecture design, Azure IaaS, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, High Availability, service resilience and distributed systems.  
• Experience as a Database Administrator, data platform design, SQL Server at scale, on-premises to Azure migrations, complex SQL Server troubleshooting, performance tuning and optimization, scaling OLTP and OLAP workloads, and securing SQL Server on-premises or in Azure   
• Experience with High Availability/Disaster Recovery solutions such as Failover Clustering, Database Mirroring, Always-On Availability Groups, and Replication   
• Use trace analysis, debug skills, source code, and other proprietary tools, to analyze problems and develop solutions to meet customer needs; this may involve writing code   
• Consultative experience along with presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences  
• Learns to identify and communicate areas in intellectual property (IP) that need refreshing or have gaps. Contributes to IP development with guidance/supervision.  
• Demonstrates strong industry knowledge and increases recognition for Microsoft solutions by contributing to and sometimes leading presentations and engagements with external and internal audiences (e.g., Tech Connect, Build, Ignite)  

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 5+ 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  
• 5+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).  
• 5+ years experience working on technical projects  
• 5+ years of experience with SQL Server, SQL Server on Azure VMs, Azure SQL DB, and/or Azure SQL Managed Instance, Data Warehouses, Power BI.   
• Experience in SQL Server at scale, on-premises to Azure migrations, complex SQL Server troubleshooting, performance tuning and optimization, scaling OLTP and OLAP workloads, and securing SQL Server on-premises or in Azure. 
• Technical Certifications in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Azure Data Platform, Power BI, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).  
• Technical experience and knowledge in Enterprise-scale technical experience with On-premises, cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, migrations, and technology management.  
• OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field AND 3+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting  
• OR equivalent experience  

Other Requirements

• Native-level Japanese language skill with highest level proficiency is a MUST have skill for this position 
• Written, Spoken English level with direct customer facing experience is plus. (Engilish resume required)
• Note: Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role’s job duties.     
• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, database migrations, and technology management.  
• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise in two or more of the following Data Platform and Analytics Cloud solutions : 
• SQL Server/Database and OSS database (PostgreSQL, MySQL etc) 
• Azure Databases (Azure SQL, Azure Postgres SQL, Azure MySQL, Cosmos DB)   
• Power BI  
• Microsoft Fabric (Fabric DW, Real-Time Intelligence, OneLake, Data Integration, Data Engineering, Copilot, Data Science)   
• Azure Databricks   
• Microsoft Purview   
• Azure AI Foundry 
• Hyperscale 
• Azure Data Factory 
• Azure Machine Learning 
• Azure Open AI 
• Cognitive services 
• NoSQL Databases including OSS (Cassandra, Mongo, and HBase etc) 
• Big Data platform such as Synapse, Snowflake, Big Query, Redshift, Spark 
• Advanced Analytics including Azure Synapse, Databricks, and visualization tools such as PowerBI, Tableau. 
• Data Science and Data Engineering including machine learning framework such as PyTorch and scikit-learn. 
• Streaming, IoT, Real-time analytics 
• Expertise in data estate workloads like HDInsight, Hadoop, Cloudera, Spark, Python  
• The technical aptitude and experience to learn new technologies and understand relevant cloud trend  
• Competitive Landscape: Knowledge of cloud development platforms  
• Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs  
• Expertise in AI like LLM Preferred
• Prior work experience in a Consulting/Architecture position within a software and/or services company such as Amazon, VMware, Google, IBM, Oracle desired 

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.

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