Overview

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success 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. Customer Experience and Success is responsible for all up services across the company, including consulting, customer success, and support across Microsoft’s portfolio of solutions and products. Join Customer Experience and Success and help us accelerate AI transformation for our customers and the world.

We are looking for a Principal Cloud Solution Architect, Cloud and AI Apps to help customers bring their AI-powered applications to production scale on Azure. In this customer-facing role, you’ll lead technical engagements across design, build, and operations, removing blockers and accelerating adoption of Azure AI, App Services, GitHub, and data platforms. As part of the Cloud and AI Apps team, you will deliver engagements leveraging existing Repeatable IP and execution engines with accountability for delivery excellence, consumption growth, and successful deployment for the customer. You will ensure production readiness of mission-critical workloads and contribute to reusable IP that scales impact. You’ll be certified in priority workloads like Azure AI Foundry, AKS, Cosmos DB, and GitHub, and collaborate with customer executives, developers, and engineers to turn innovation into real-world outcomes.

Responsibilities

Engage with customer IT and business leaders to understand their application, data, and AI priorities, and design secure, scalable solutions that drive business value and customer satisfaction.

Lead technical engagements across architecture design, Proof of Concepts (POCs), and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) to accelerate adoption of Azure AI, App Services, GitHub, and data platforms.

Own the end-to-end technical delivery results, ensuring completeness and accuracy of consumption and customer success plans in collaboration with the CSAM.

Drive next best actions and generate incremental pipeline from each engagement, aligning with Unified Enterprise Support (ES) priorities.

Deliver repeatable intellectual property (IP) and contribute to centralized IP development to accelerate deployment and achieve targeted outcomes.

Provide delivery oversight and escalation support for key Factory engagements across AI and App Innovation projects.

Lead the health, resiliency, security, and optimization of mission-critical workloads, ensuring readiness for production-scale AI use cases.

Act as the Voice of the Customer by sharing insights and feedback with engineering teams to influence product improvements and remove adoption blockers.

Support customer skilling through technical workshops, readiness activities, and recommendations that ensure solution performance, maintainability, and reliability.

Maintain deep technical expertise and stay current with Azure, AI, GitHub, and cloud-native development trends, while contributing to internal and external technical communities.

Be accredited and certified to deliver with advanced and expert-level proficiency in priority workloads including Azure AI Foundry, AKS, App Service, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, APIM, and GitHub.

Demonstrate a growth mindset by continuously aligning your skills to customer needs, contributing to knowledge sharing, and mentoring others to accelerate customer outcomes.

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.

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 consulting OR 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.