About the role
We are looking for an experienced Cloud Solution Architect with deep expertise in Azure PaaS and Azure AI services. The ideal candidate will architect, design, and deliver scalable cloud-native solutions leveraging Microsoft Azure’s PaaS and AI portfolio. This role involves hands-on development, architecture design, customer engagement, and driving AI adoption across enterprise applications.
Support for Mission Critical is a team within Microsoft that provides solution-specific expertise designed to drive peak health and optimum performance of a customer’s most important solutions. As a key technical resource for the customer, you will be primarily focused on delivering proactive services such as education workshops, delivering assessments, and providing tailored guidance. Troubleshooting skills are essential as this role will include working with Microsoft Support to expedite incident resolution.
Responsibilities:
- Provide architectural reviews and technical guidance to Support for Mission Critical (SfMC) customers, focusing on reliability, security, and performance.
- Take end-to-end ownership and accountability of technical deliverables, ensuring alignment with customer business outcomes and Microsoft’s best practices.
- Identify architectural risks, design gaps, and operational inefficiencies across services.
- Engage with SfMC stakeholders to drive architectural validation, incident prevention, and workload health improvements through proactive engagements and deep technical assessments.
- Collaborate closely with Microsoft engineering and support teams to address escalations, share feedback, and align solutions with platform evolution.
- Drive creation and reusability of IP including scripts, tools, and technical documentation to support scalable SfMC engagements.
- Act as a trusted advisor to customer architects and engineers, influencing long-term technical strategy for stability, resilience, and innovation.
- Provide technical leadership and scale innovation: mentor and upskill others, contribute to frameworks, methodologies, and intellectual property, lead cross-functional collaboration, share industry insights, and drive improvements that enable scalable, repeatable customer and partner success.
Qualifications:
Required Qualifications:
- 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
Additional Preferred Qualifications:
- 10+ years of experience in cloud data platforms, with a strong focus on Azure.
- Hands-on experience with Azure Databricks, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Factory, and Azure AI services (including Cognitive Services and OpenAI) in secure environments, including data warehousing, ETL pipelines, and real-time data processing.
- Proven expertise in data engineering, data science workflows, and ML model deployment using Azure tools.
- Experience designing and implementing end-to-end AI/ML solutions in enterprise environments.
- Strong understanding of distributed computing, big data processing, and data lake architectures.
- Familiarity with Cosmos DB and SQL Server will be helpful.
- Experience with Azure architecture, including IaaS, PaaS, and serverless components.
- Ability to use debugging tools, trace analysis, and source code to troubleshoot and optimize performance.
- Solid understanding of networking, security, and resilience in cloud-native applications.
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work collaboratively in cross-functional teams.
- Excellent communication skills in international environments, both spoken and written English.
- Effective learning and presentation skills, with comfort in addressing both small and large audiences.
- Ability to work under pressure and meet deadlines.