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 CE&S Strategy and Operations (S&O) organization is seeking a Forward Deployed Solutions Architect to support customer‑facing Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) engagements. This role focuses on accelerating clarity of scope, enabling timely MVP delivery, and supporting consistent, repeatable solution approaches across engagements.

Working within the Forward Deployed Engineer model, the Solutions Architect collaborates with account teams, delivery leads, and customers to translate defined business needs into clear, technically feasible solution designs. The role participates early in engagement shaping, provides practical technical guidance throughout the delivery lifecycle, and helps identify and mitigate risks that may impact execution.

This position plays a key role in driving solution quality, delivery consistency, and alignment with established engineering practices across FDE engagements.

Unlike pre sales or advisory roles, the FDE Solutions Architect is accountable for setting up the projects for successful delivery outcomes, acts as a peer to FDE Delivery and Operations leadership, and continually being focused on unblocking teams to ensure fast, high quality execution.

• Business Impact & Success Metrics
• The FDE Solutions Architect is accountable for improving the following business metrics:
• Time to Agreed Scope – accelerating technical scoping across all deals
• Time to Contract / Start – reducing friction between sales and delivery
• Time to First MVP – ensuring rapid delivery of customer validated value
• Customer Reported Delivery Quality Score – tracked similar to CSAT (1–5), reflecting solution architecture quality, clarity, and execution readiness

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 Technical Leadership & Scoping Acceleration:

• Acting as a technical authority to accelerate time to agreed scope across all FDE engagements. Helping to map the business aspirations into tangible use cases that can be accomplished with Microsoft solutions (and 3rd party software solutions where applicable)
• Partner with Account Teams, FDE Delivery Leads, and customers to define and validate solution scope, architecture, and delivery approach.
• Ensure scoped solutions are realistic, scalable, and MVP driven, avoiding over engineering and unnecessary complexity.
• Identify and mobilize the right technical resources, optimizing deployment, rotation, and reuse of FDE talent.

Delivery Velocity & MVP Ownership:

• Own and actively manage delivery velocity, with accountability for reducing time to delivery start and first MVP.
• Unblock technical and execution issues across FDE delivery teams, holding teams accountable to agreed timelines and outcomes.
• Ensure MVPs are measurable, customer validated, and positioned to scale into broader solutions.

Pattern Recognition & Organizational Learning:

• Track and analyze recurring customer requests, technical patterns, and delivery architectures across engagements.
• Identify technical best practices and partner with engineering, product, and operations to institutionalize them, including development of AI-led efficiency solutions that speed time to MVP.
• Share insights and learnings across FDE delivery teams to continuously improve speed, quality, and consistency.

Operational Leadership & Visibility:

• Act as a peer to the FDE Operations Manager, co leading operational calls reviewing active FDE engagements, delivery risks and unblockers, and MVP progress and scope integrity.
• Elevate high quality FDE work by identifying customer success stories and references for internal communications, social and field storytelling, and earnings and executive narratives.

Other:

• Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications Required:

• Bachelor's 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.

Preferred:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Information Technology, Business Administration, Information Security, Information Security, or related field
• 8+ years of experience in technical solution architecture, delivery engineering, or forward deployed roles
• Strong background in systems design, distributed systems, data platforms, cloud architectures, or enterprise software
• Proven experience working directly with customers to shape, scope, and deliver complex technical solution
• Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical plans and MVPs
• Experience operating in fast moving, high ambiguity environments where speed to value matters
• Strong influence and communication skills with the ability to hold technical teams accountable without direct authority
• Experience working within or adjacent to a Forward Deployed Engineer model
• Experience operating across sales, delivery, and operations organizations
• Familiarity with agile and iterative delivery models focused on MVPs and customer validation
• Experience identifying reusable patterns and scaling delivery best practices

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.