Cloud Solution Architect

With over 18,000 employees worldwide, the Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) organization is responsible for the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft’s end-to-end customer experience. Come join CE&S and help us build a future where customers come to us not only because we provide industry-leading products and services, but also because we provide a differentiated and connected customer experience.

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.

Microsoft aspires to help our customers achieve their own digital transformation, leveraging the power of the Microsoft cloud solutions and services. To help drive this effort, Microsoft is investing in the creation of Customer Success dedicated team that will play a key role in helping Microsoft customers achieve this digital transformation through successful adoption of Microsoft Cloud solution and Services.

The Customer Success team will drive change management and adoption activities with key business decision makers and IT decision makers, helping reduce implementation risk, driving usage of existing solutions, and identifying opportunities to accelerate the path for customers to realize business value from their investments.

We are looking for a **Cloud Solution Architect (CSA)**:
You will be implementing technical strategies for customer success, you'll drive upskilling initiatives, guide field teams in technical execution, and actively contribute to IP creation. Your role extends to fostering collaboration across groups for the development of customer-ready content. You will act as a linchpin between field teams and the Global Customer Success organization. You'll collaborate closely with the Product group to integrate the latest advancements. Drive high priority customer initiatives in collaboration with customers and in the Microsoft field.

This is also a customer-facing role, responsible for providing end-to-end technical guidance and expertise. If you're committed to driving excellence in both strategy and execution, join us in shaping the future of our Customer Experience in Azure.

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 100% 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**:
**Customer Centricity**:

- Understand customers’ overall infrastructure estate, IT and business priorities and success measures to design implementation architectures and solutions (Microsoft and 3rd party solutions)
- 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 internal teams 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. Advocates for the customer/partner at all opportunities and shares customer success stories with the wider internal team.
- Develops and expands existing impactful relationships with customer and partner architects and technical specialists, technical decision makers (TDMs), and business stakeholders. 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 value through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. Contributes to and understands how work aligns with customer success plan and meets customer/partner needs by partnering with the appropriate internal teams and resources to deliver customer outcomes. Supports customer skilling by delivering as a trusted technical advisor to ensure customer readiness by facilitating technical discussions and enabling operational health and cloud readiness. Assesses and transfers knowledge to close customer skill gaps.
- Guides other team members to focus on customer/partner experience through efficient delivery and ensuring a seamless and connected customer experience. Supports definition of customer/partner conditions of success. Anticipates customer/partner dissatisfaction and unmet needs and executes strategies to improve experience, value realization, and acceleration of customer transformation.
- Actively listens and respectfully challenges customers/partners when go