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 Customer Experience & Success organization helps customers realize business value with Microsoft cloud. We are hiring a Chief Architect - Global Customer Success to lead cross-portfolio architecture across Azure data, analytics, AI, and developer services. You will guide customers from concept to production with secure, reliable, and well-governed solutions, and set the standard for architectural excellence across our largest engagements.

As a senior technical leader, you will shape end-to-end solution strategy; publish reference architectures and guardrails; drive implementation quality; and mentor architects while partnering with engineering, product, and program teams. You will also produce reusable assets (patterns, code, demos, labs) and enable field teams through workshops and communities of practice—raising technical fluency and accelerating outcomes for customers.

You pair deep cloud engineering expertise with strong business acumen and executive communication. You are comfortable engaging C-suite leaders and development teams alike; translating goals into actionable architectures; managing risk; and delivering measurable outcomes. You thrive in ambiguous, multi-workload programs, and you set the bar for engineering rigor, security, identity, observability, and reliability.

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

• Understand a customer’s business goals and constraints; design Data, Analytics, and AI solutions that deliver measurable value.
• Own end‑to‑end customer engagements, deeply understanding business objectives, constraints, and success metrics to deliver measurable outcomes.
• Act as the customer’s trusted technical advisor, translating business challenges into scalable, secure, and impactful cloud and Data & AI solutions.
• Drive customer success by aligning solution architecture with strategic priorities, industry requirements, and long‑term transformation goals.

Business impact

• Drive cloud consumption and value realization by identifying expansion opportunities and resolving blockers across the solution lifecycle.
• Design modern data platforms and intelligent applications; lead pilots/MVPs and guide hardening for production.
• Identify opportunities to develop repeatable assets and patterns that shorten time-to-production.

Technical leadership

• Serve as a business and technology advocate, collaborating with STU, ATU, PG, and CSU stakeholders to translate business challenges into scalable Azure solutions.
• Author enterprise Data & AI reference architectures and solution blueprints, establishing security, identity, observability, and reliability guardrails for scalable, production-grade platforms
• Lead Architecture Design Sessions (ADS) with customers and stakeholders, guiding architecture reviews and readiness assessments to mitigate risk and optimize resiliency, performance, and cost at enterprise scale.
• Create reusable assets (demos, labs, code samples, documentation) and enable architects through workshops and communities of practice.

Delivery & operational excellence

• Orchestrate end-to-end delivery from discovery through production handoff, including CI/CD, test strategy, telemetry, and incident response.
• Define ‘happy paths and automation for environment setup, data onboarding, and deployment to reduce variance and improve quality.
• Champion responsible AI, privacy, and data protection practices throughout design and delivery.
• Leverage the delivery order of operations to ensure efficient and rapid delivery of all customer projects.

Stakeholder management

• Engage senior business and technology leaders to align solution strategies with outcomes, KPIs, and compliance requirements.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to evaluate features, influence roadmaps, and close platform gaps based on customer evidence.
• Communicate tradeoffs and decisions clearly to executives and engineering stakeholders.
• Ensure leadership visibility into project health by clearly articulating blockers, risks, and dependencies to SLT, driving early mitigation actions and course correction to protect delivery timelines and business outcomes.

People & mentorship

• Mentor senior individual contributors and raise the bar on design quality, documentation, and operational readiness.
• Model a growth mindset—share learnings, stay current on market trends, and contribute to internal communities.

Qualifications:

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 7+ 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.
• Depth across Azure data/analytics and AI services (e.g., Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, Microsoft Foundry) and developer platform (GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Copilot).

Other Requirements:

• This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Candidates must have authorization to work in the United States that does not now or in the future require employer sponsorship.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 12+ 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 consultingOR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, Liberal Arts, or related field AND 8+ years experience in cloud/infrastructure technologies, technology solutions, practice development, architecture, and/or consulting
• OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years experience working in a customer-facing role (e.g., internal and/or external).
• 6+ years experience leading technical projects.
• Technical Certification in Cloud (e.g., Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google, security certifications).

Cloud Solution Architecture IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $130,900 - $251,900 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 $165,600 - $272,300 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.