Senior Cloud Solution Architect

Overview

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. Join CE&S and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

The Global Customer Success (GCS) organization is leading the effort to create the desired customer experience through support offer creation, driving digital transformation across our tools, and delivering operational excellence across CE&S.

As a Cloud Solution Architect aligned to Factory delivery, you will enable customers to achieve their outcomes based on their investments in Microsoft technology. Leveraging your Microsoft Copilot Studio technical subject matter expertise, you will lead technical conversations with customers and Microsoft colleagues, driving value to their organization. This is a hands-on role that includes accelerating customer adoption by building Agentic AI solutions and identifying resolutions to unblock customer success projects for the AI Factory. You will also drive product influence with Engineering through technical feedback via the factory. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your technical and program management skills, and deepen your cloud expertise.

CSAs are senior individual contributors who operate globally and engage directly with customers. It is a hands-on technical role spanning across design, build, and production with a focus on issue resolution to remove customer production blockers. Candidates are expected to comfortably switch from a whiteboard to the keyboard. This is a truly exciting role that will feature unique and challenging technical problems to solve and to help our customers succeed.

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

Customer-Centric Approach:

Play a pivotal role in the AI Cloud Accelerate Factory, providing technical enablement, operational support, and strategic engagement across customer projects. This role is designed to ensure successful delivery of AI solutions built on Copilot Studio, troubleshoot complex issues, and support innovation through pilot evaluations and advanced use case development. Understand customers overall data estate, business priorities, and IT success measures. Innovate with Agent solutions that drive business value.

Facilitate scalable delivery through strong technical program management utilizing a factory model/approach, driving program awareness and demand across the regional operating units.  Attend in-flight project status meetings to monitor progress and identify support needs. Engage directly with complex or non-standard customer use cases beyond existing accelerators. Participate in intake reviews for milestone sizing, objection handling, and technical scoping.

Ensure Solution Excellence: Deliver solutions with high performance, security, scalability, maintainability, repeatability, reusability, and reliability upon deployment. Gather insights from customers and partners and maintain a high CSAT.

Business Impact:

Usage (Cloud & Support) Growth: Develop opportunities to drive Customer Success business results by working with business and technical decision makers to ensure they understand Microsoft 365, Copilot and Copilot Studio value proposition and get value from their investment in Microsoft technology.

Resolution of Customer Blockers: Identify resolutions to issues blocking go-live of customer success projects by leveraging deep knowledge of Microsoft 365 services & technical subject matter expertise. Lead technical conversations with customers to drive value from their Microsoft 365 investments and implement AI Agents. Deliver all work according to Factory best practices & policies and using repeatable IP.

Architect Copilot Studio Agent Solutions: Apply technical knowledge to design solutions aligned with business and IT needs. Create Innovate with Agent roadmaps, lead POCs and MVPs, and ensure long-term technical viability.

Technical Leadership:

Advocate for Customers: Share insights and best practices, collaborate with the Factory team to address key blockers, and influence improvements, roadmap and feature prioritization.

Resolve technical blockers: Debug technical issues and provide fixes for engagements encountering blockers.

Learn It All: Demonstrate Self Learner mindset through continuous alignment of individual skilling to team/area demands and Customer Success goals.

Continuous Learning: Stay updated on market trends, collaborate with the technical community, and educate customers about the Copilot Studio capabilities and platform.

Accelerate Customer Outcomes: Through engaging with field teams, share expertise, drive factory nomination pipeline, and promote Factory to accelerate customer success, as well as collate feedback upon execution to drive improvement and leverage field teams inputs.

Business Process Analysis:

Depict customer business processes and prepare for the analysis and improvement of business process performance.

Articulate, demo, and present complex customer concepts to varying audiences, such as BDMs (Business Decision Makers) & ITDMs (Information Technology Decision Makers).

Experienced in delivery management, opportunity qualification, stakeholder communication, and partner engagement, including opportunity and pipeline mgmt.

Experience in ensuring customers realize value by consuming technology.

Collaboration & field Engagement: Experienced in collaborating in virtual teams to develop and drive M365 Copilot usage opportunities through influence. Identify and document best practices and customer references/ Winwires.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 4+ 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
• OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

• Microsoft is unable to sponsor a work visa for this role due to the nature of the role's job duties.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and / or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire / transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, 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 consulting

• OR Masters Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 6+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting

• OR equivalent experience.

4+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).

4+ years experience working on technical projects.

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 in one or more of the following:
• Deep Domain Expertise in M365 Areas: Deep domain expertise in one or more of the M365 specific areas, such as Microsoft IQ understanding, Connectors, MCP Servers and Copilot Studio OR hands-on experience working with the respective products at the expert level.
• Low Code development experience - Power Platform experience is needed. Copilot 365 and Teams background is useful for the role
• 8+ years experience working in a customer-facing role and on technical M365/Power Platform/Copilot Studio projects.
• Architecting Enterprise-Grade Solutions: Deep knowledge of solution architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of Cloud/collaboration environments.
• Certification in one or more of the following technologies preferred: M365 fundamentals, M365 Copilot fundamentals, Microsoft Power Platform/Copilot Studio platforms, Microsoft Azure fundamentals, Cloud Security, AI Business Professional and AI Transformation Leader, AI Fundamentals.
• Fluency in SaaS solutions; particularly all Microsoft 365 offerings.
• Domain experience Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure solutions, and understanding of how Microsoft Security, compliance, and identity solutions that can span across these solution areas to provide a holistic and end-to-end solution.
• Competitive Landscape knowledge of cloud and AI platforms. Understanding of M365 partner ecosystems and creation of Agents to solve customer needs.
• Breadth of technical experience and knowledge, with depth / SME in two or more of the following M365 solutions: M365 Copilot, Power Platform/Copilot Studio, Azure Foundry, IDM
• Information Protection & Compliance
• Governance & Risk Management
• Agentic Workflows: Familiarity with Agent Framework, MCP, Langchain, or other agentic frameworks.
• Generative AI and Responsible AI: Foundational knowledge of current and emerging AI technology, including Generative AI technology applications and use cases (including, but not limited to, Large Language Models) and Foundational models toolsets.
• Understanding of Responsible AI practice including ethical considerations, bias mitigation, and fairness.
• Competitive Landscape: Understanding the competitive landscape is valuable; candidates should be aware of key AI platforms beyond Azure, such as AWS and GCP.
• Collaboration and Communication: Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills.  Presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences.

Cloud Solution Architecture IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $106,400 - $203,600 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 $137,600 - $222,600 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

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.