Why Microsoft

Our love for innovation, technology and doing meaningful work, is at the heart of everything we do at Microsoft ANZ. It is a shared passion that inspires our team and customers to think bigger.  

In this role, you’ll be joining our Customer Success Unit, the “CSU”, where our mission is to empower our customers to adopt and succeed with world class technologies to achieve their aspirations for growth, innovation, and community.

This Cloud Solution Architect role is a trusted advisor to our customers with a passion for application development, helping our customers develop innovative solutions using Azure application services.

They will work with select customers to lead deep technical architecture discussions, with senior customer executives, enterprise architects, IT management, security and with developers. They’ll work with customer teams to assist the development of innovative solutions, from pilot to production to enhancement and optimisation. They’ll help developers enhance their capabilities and become a valued contributor to developer communities within their customers. Within Microsoft, they will collaborate with product engineering to share feedback into the development of Microsoft products and help develop Azure services that meet customer needs.

This role is perfect for someone who loves being hands-on with technology, and has a consulting customer leadership approach.

As a “Microsoftie”, your daily actions will contribute to our inclusive culture. “Culture is like the air we breathe, a combination of fundamental elements, all of which starts with the individual. It's habit forming, is founded on our values and encompasses of how we treat each other and our customers, every day.” Pete 'Dr Pete' Stanski - GM Customer Success Unit

Responsibilities

The purpose of this role

Understanding Customer/Partner Technical Environment

• 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. Adapts business models, plans, and solutions to insights.
• Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving new feedback, gaps, blockers, insights, resources, etc. across communities to track, add, and prioritize, using established channels (e.g., UAT/TFT).

Architecture Design and Deployment

• Leverages and champions an existing architecture approach to achieve Microsoft's agreed commitments to the customer/partner. Identifies growth opportunities based on knowledge of customer/partner needs.
• Receives and synthesizes data about customer/partner business and technical requirements, addresses them with technical architecture(s), and demonstrates and proves those solutions capability and business value through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner.
• Applies broad technical knowledge across various of architecture solutions to meet business and information technology (IT) requirements and resolve identified technical constraints. helps to shape and enhance customers' requirements.
• Leads customer/partner projects that implement technical architecture(s). Provides thought leadership for technical architecture design, development, and deployment and supports/drives the customer/partner throughout pre-sales and/or implementation.
• Identifies, escalates, and works to resolve technical blockers (e.g., changing configurations, sample coding) to accelerate architecture implementations and routes non-technical issues for removal by the appropriate party.
• Adapts methodology and applies governance to identify, communicate, and minimize business and technical risks (e.g. Well-Architected Framework, Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, Cloud Adoption Framework). Defines customer/partner conditions of success, adheres to quality assurance, and calculates risks while designing and/or delivering solutions.

Practice Development

• Generates new ideas for changes and improvements to existing intellectual property (IP), technologies, and processes for designated customers/partners. drives opportunities for IP re-use, best practice sharing, and consumption.

Trusted Advisor

• Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner/MCS architects and technical specialists, technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders.
• Respectfully challenges customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalates appropriately.
• Understands the competitor's architecture solutions and identifies Microsoft's strengths over competitive solutions to drive conversations with customers/partners and convince them of solution.

Thought Leadership

• Shares ideas, insight, and strategic, technical input with technical teams, internal communities across the field, and the larger virtual team across Microsoft using a thorough knowledge of specific Microsoft products and their context in the competitive landscape.
• Participates in external architect community events (e.g., conferences, seminars, technical meetups, Webcasts, blogs, hackathons) and shares learnings with the internal team. Acts a mentor to junior colleagues to educate them on technical and non-technical concepts.

Customer Usage

• Leads architecture design, resiliency reviews, and technical optimization that result in production deployment application and increase customer business value. Drives efforts to ensure that the customer's environment and applications are well-architected.

Other

• Embody our culture and values

Qualifications

What skills do you need to have?

There will be many opportunities for you to learn and grow into this role and Microsoft.

However, to be able to best deliver on the purpose of this role, these are the core skills and experiences you should have on day one:

• Cloud application architectures, application development in the cloud, application migration to the cloud.
• Experience in building deep relationships with lead developers, application architects and senior IT executives in large customers.
• Technical pre-sales support to ensure customers are empowered to make informed decisions around suitable technology components and architectures for their solutions.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field is preferred, or additional experience in lieu of this.

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or cloud/infrastructure technologies
  • OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years experience in technology solutions, practice development, architecture, consulting, and/or cloud/infrastructure technologies
  • OR equivalent experience.