Cloud Solutions 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.

Gathers customer/partner insights and leverages these insights to design architectures, provide expertise/guidance, develop, propose and deliver Microsoft solutions to achieve customer/partner business outcomes and drive to completion the resolution/unblocking of their issues, resulting in accelerated consumption. Is a trusted advisor and represents the voice of the customer within Microsoft to ensure alignment with customer feedback and strategy. Leverages knowledge of the products, services, and value propositions of Microsoft and its competitors in customer/partner conversations to identify growth opportunities based on knowledge of customer/partner needs. Contributes to increase in consumption of cloud & support and aligns with Customer Success Account Managers (CSAMs) on customer/partner priorities to drive growth in consumption via cost optimization, operational excellence performance efficiency, and in accordance with Microsoft best practices. Contributes to Intellectual Property (IP) creation and updates. Identifies and addresses blockers and gaps, making improvements to products and practices. Develops, maintains, and expands customer relationships. Shares ideas, insights, and input with internal teams while participating in external communities.

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
- Gathers customer/partner insights (e.g., feedback around technical preferences, environments, business needs) and leverages these insights and existing plans to map solutions with customer/partner business outcomes. Acts as the voice of the customer (VOC)/partner by driving awareness of existing feedback, insights, and resources with internal teams to add and prioritize. Shares customer success stories with the wider internal team.
- Identifies and begins developing impactful relationships with internal teams and customer and partner technical specialists during initial preparation and ramp-up stages. Proposes viable solutions based on specific technical products. Demonstrates complex concepts, and proves the capability of those solutions through design collaboration sessions with the customer/partner. Understands how work aligns with customer success plan and meets customer/partner needs by working with internal teams 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. Transfers knowledge to customers close customer skill gaps.
- Contributes to customer satisfaction by providing a positive customer/partner experience. Demonstrates an understanding of customer/partner conditions of success. Identifies dissatisfied customers and builds remedial actions (e.g., post-mortem reviews).
- Actively listens and respectfully challenges customers/partners when going in the wrong direction and escalates appropriately.

Business Impact
- Independently identifies issues and advises customers/partners to operate and optimize performance in accordance with Microsoft best practices. Escalates issues to senior team members or manager, as needed. Applies methodology and governance to minimize business and technical risks and adhere to quality assurance while ensuring excellence in contributions to design and/or delivery of solutions. Adheres to quality assurance standards and calculates risks while ensuring excellence in the design and/or delivery of solutions. Leverages standard tools to ensure accurate opportunity and milestone execution and pipeline hygiene.
- Understands the competitor''s architecture solutions and identifies Microsoft''s strengths over competitive solutions to demonstrate Microsoft''s value to customers/partners.

Technical Leadership
- Leverages development opportunities (e.g., mentorships, role-based resources, trainings, internal events suc